


Parallel Lines

by Abalidoth



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Autistic Fareeha Amari, Canon character crossing into AU, F/F, I am being terrible to my favorite characters, Multi, Not a dystopian AU, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Talon Tracer AU, Trans Emily (Overwatch), Trans Jesse McCree, a whole bunch of Numbani OCs, some things are worse but some things are better, super awkward para-time romantic tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-05-27 19:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15031274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abalidoth/pseuds/Abalidoth
Summary: Tracer finds herself in a parallel timeline, helping the Overwatch of this universe face a dark mirror of herself... but all she really wants to do is find her way home to Emily and Amélie.





	1. Prologue

_“Lines that are parallel meet at infinity!”_

_Euclid repeatedly, heatedly, urged._

_Until he died, and so reached that vicinity:_

_in it, he found that the damned things diverged._

\-- Piet Hein

 

When the day started, the biggest problem Lena Oxton had was getting her girlfriends to make nice.

“Listen, love,” she said, retrieving her pulse bombs from a stabilized magnetic case. Things tended to rattle about on a supersonic aircraft like Overwatch VTOL-3, and high-powered thiotimoline explosive charges were not something anyone wanted banging around. “This is a big day for me. It’s the anniversary of when I came back from…when I came back. And I want you there.”

“Of course,” Widowmaker said, without looking up from her rifle. “As long as she is not.”

Tracer nearly growled. “That’s not how this works, Amélie.”

“If you think I am jealous, that is not it.” Amélie looked up, finally. “I do not have a problem sharing your affections. I simply don’t like her company. There is a difference.”

“You are so --” Tracer’s phone bleeped, loud enough to be audible over the whine of the jet engines. “One sec.”

> Emily: No.
> 
> Lena: come on, love! this is important.
> 
> Emily: I know, it’s important to me, too. That’s why I want to be able to actually enjoy it, which I can’t do with Little Miss Muffet there.
> 
> Lena: ugh
> 
> Lena: you’re not going to like this but
> 
> Lena: you two sound exactly alike

“Why can’t you just have two dinners?” Amélie asked. “Twice the celebration is good, no?”

“It wouldn’t be twice the celebration. It would be half the celebration I want, twice.”

Amélie shrugged and went back to her gun repairs.

> Emily: You’re right.
> 
> Emily: I don’t like that much at all.
> 
> Lena: please don’t be difficult about this, em
> 
> Lena: why is this such a big deal?
> 
> Emily: ...I guess I’m coming across as a massive bitch, aren’t I?
> 
> Lena: a little bit. :/
> 
> Emily: I’m sorry.
> 
> Emily: Why couldn’t you just have two dinners?

Lena was almost relieved when her angry reply was cut short by the pilot’s announcement. “Five minutes to the drop zone,” Winston said over the address system. “Tracer, would you mind flying our final approach? We’re going to have to come in hot.”

“You got it, big guy. Be up in a sec.” Tracer replied, touching her throat mic. “Amélie, I… guess I can have two dinners. If this is so _distasteful_ to you.”

Lena must have used a little more venom than she intended, because she saw Amélie flinch slightly. “I am sorry, chérie. I just don’t… I will think about it. We can talk after the mission, no?”

“All right.” Tracer pulled her way, handhold by handhold, to the fore of the cargo compartment.

“Lena?”

There was a fragility in Amélie’s countenance that stopped Tracer’s heart. “Yeah?”

“Be careful.”

“Careful never got me very far,” Lena replied, tucking her phone in a webbing pocket and swinging herself through the cockpit door.

\---

> Lena: because being in two places at once is my _job_
> 
> Lena: not how I want to live my life
> 
> Lena: dropping now. we’ll talk after.

\---

The first part of the operation had gone beautifully, not that anyone had much doubt. Los Muertos might have been a big deal to the other street gangs of the area, but even in its reduced state, Overwatch was more than a match for them. The guards were mopped up efficiently, disabled or knocked unconscious, and stacked to the side of the staging area like cordwood.

The part that came next was trickier. Because Los Muertos were working for _someone_ , and whoever that was probably had the ability to send reinforcements. “Tracer,” Soldier: 76 said. “Acknowledge.”

She flashed in front of him after sweeping the perimeter again. “Present. Area’s clear.”

He nodded crisply, gestured off at an alley she’d already identified as the most likely point of hostile ingress, and turned to address the rest of the team on his wrist comm. “All right, everyone! Get on the payload!”

The big diesel engine of the truck rumbled to life behind her as she darted down the alleyway one more time. Dorado’s maze of tiny colonial streets was custom built for ambushes and booby traps; fortunately, there was nobody alive who could out-ambush Lena Oxton.  Sure enough, she spotted a tripwire and a small, makeshift guard tower made out of old pallets and tape. Her erstwhile attackers were all dressed in Los Muertos’ ill-advised day-glo camouflage. “Widowmaker,” she whispered into her throat mic. “Got hostiles, fifty meters from my position.”

“Acknowledged, _Tracer_.” Lena gritted her teeth. The insistence on codenames during missions was a useful bit of emotional distancing, but she had to admit, it was a powerful tool for passive-aggression. “Lethal takedown?”

“No need. Knock out their structure and I’ll mop up the rest.”

“ _Oui._ ” Somewhere behind her, a rifle crack sounded, followed by two more. They were perfectly timed, like a metronome. Suddenly missing two of the cinderblocks maintaining its structure, the guard tower lurched, pallets sliding and splintering over one another in a mad show of gravity. The Los Muertos members staggered, swinging their submachine guns around wildly.

Tracer blinked in between two of them and neatly snatched their guns out of their hands, clubbing a third before she had a chance to turn around. “Sorry lads. Not today.” The disarmed ones made for her at the same time, only to collide in a tangle of limbs when she vanished. A few more well-placed blows kept them there.

“Anyone else want to come out?” She was answered with a roar of engines. Lena scanned the horizon until she saw engine exhaust, turning just in time to see the VTOL break position and pull far back, nearing the horizon. The silence it left was a chasm in her mental picture of the battlefield, not least of which because Amélie -- her girlfriend, her fire support -- was on that plane. She could feel her pulse as she touched her mic. “Soldier, status report, why is the bird retreating?”

“Tracer, regroup behind the payload,” Soldier: 76’s voice crackled with some kind of interference. “We’ve got a situation.”

“Aye aye.” Tracer half-sprinted, half-blinked through the twisting alleyway, one eye on the sky to watch the VTOL’s retreat when there was a break in the sightlines. “Is it more hostiles?”

“It’s a bomb.” The voice didn’t just come from her earpiece; Soldier was standing at the mouth of the alleyway, weapon at the ready and shoulders tense. “Some kind of EMP, we think. They _wanted_ us to show up, dammit.”

“No, that doesn’t make sense. If that was the plan they would have just detonated it already. Like the one in King’s Row.”

He shrugged. “We should extract, all the same.”

Something pulled at the back of Lena’s mind, a familiar and unpleasant sensation. “I should take a look at this.”

“That’s a negative.”

“I think I know what this is.”

“We’re extracting, and that’s an _order._ ”

“Um…” Winston’s voice was nearly incomprehensible over the audio distortion. It sounded like someone waving a sheet of steel in a hurricane. “These buildings are still occupied. If this is a bomb, and there’s any chance of defusing it…”

Lena looked to Soldier, who heaved a single heavy sigh. “This is Talon tech, Lena.”

She nodded. “Just a look. If there’s nothing I can do…there’s nothing I can do.”

The bomb was a stubby cylinder about fifteen feet long and five feet wide. It was originally fairly smooth, but some chunky rectilinear segments had slid out of it. Eerie blue light flooded out of the cracks, casting actinic shadows on the worn cobbles below.

Tracer walked up to it, feeling time contract around her. There was an inaudible humming, forming a perfect discordant tritone with the familiar vibration of her chronal accelerator. She felt the straps holding it to her chest tighten and bite into her back.

“It’s a Slipstream engine,” she whispered.

Nobody answered. She turned to see Soldier, frozen in mid-sentence, as though through aquarium glass. A rippling discontinuity separated a bubble of sliptime from the regular time outside, and that bubble was expanding.

This Slipstream engine was much larger than the one in the plane of the same name, but she recognized the design, she recognized the effect. Talon was trying to temporally displace an entire neighborhood full of people. They were trying to afflict a whole town of civilians with the same utter hell she survived for an immeasurable eternity.

“Oh _fuck_ no.” Lena clambered over the top of the thing, looking for any kind of aperture into it. After a moment, she found it -- a hole barely bigger than her arm, near the front end of the cylinder, where another piece of metal had slid away to form a protrusion. Light blasted from the hole like a welding torch, hot enough to warm Lena’s arm as she stuck it deep into the machine. Her chronal accelerator bucked and whined as she directed it to stabilize not only her, but what she was touching. And what she was touching was the exact opposite of the device on her chest.

She fought a wave of nausea as they connected. Her accelerator pushed _forward,_ the engine shoved equally _back_ , and the energies released rattled her very bones. Spots swam in front of her eyes. She tasted pennies as the bone jarring quake made her bite her tongue.

And then there was a slip, a lurch, a sickening nothing.

As Tracer fell into the fissure, she realized the bomb would not be destroyed as she had planned. Two strong forces in opposition rarely balance exactly. Instead, they slip, twist, buckle to the side -- a one-dimensional force diagram becomes two as the energy redirects in a perpendicular direction. With one shoving towards the future and another pushing in reverse, there was only one direction for that energy to go.

Lena closed her eyes, losing consciousness as she fell sideways into an unfamiliar _now_.


	2. Intersection pt. 1

Just off the bridge of the _SS Angela Ziegler_ was a small, simply appointed office. There wasn’t much there – a small photo of a woman and her daughter, a well-loved tea set, a framed copy of Overwatch’s refounding charter – that would indicate how much of the world’s fate hinged on decisions made in that room.

The woman behind the desk, Amélie thought, was another matter. Admiral Ana Amari held herself with every centimeter of her station, and every kilogram of her responsibilities. She could be anywhere in the world and everyone would know her importance.

Right now, that imposing aura was turned down a bit. Ana was in Good Boss mode. “Amélie, welcome, welcome. Sit. Tea?”

“Thank you.” Amélie did so, waiting in patient silence while Ana turned and busied herself with the tea.

“There’s been a situation,” Ana said without preamble, handing Amélie a steaming cup fragrant with mint. “In Mexico. Reports came in three hours ago from Dorado, a Lumérikar company town. Civilians are mentioning –ah, how did Jesse put it – ‘weird shit.’ How soon can you fly out?”

“Who’s the client?”

Ana shook her head. “No client right now. We might be able to get Mexico to pick up the tab if we find something suspicious enough – a lot of the government is in Lumérikar’s pockets, but not all of it. Lumérico started there, has a lot of deep roots, but the anti-corruption measures they put in place after the riots in ’31 still have quite a lot of sway.”

“Out of the kindness of our hearts, then?” Amélie raised a brow.

“Goodness no. We have a particular stake in this. See, the weird shit has a distinctly temporal aspect to it.”

The breath hitched in Amélie’s throat. “Ah.”

“We don’t have _explicit_ confirmation that she’s behind it,” Ana warned. “But it’s worth looking into. She’s been off the radar for a couple of months.”

“Mm.” That wasn’t exactly true. Confirmed sightings of the Talon assassin known as Pulsar were rare, but enough unconfirmed sightings in the right pattern gave Odette a good idea of her movements over time. Mexico sounded right – and Amélie had put a lot of thought into this.

“Amélie…” Ana sighed. “You’re the best principal we have for this mission. But I need to make sure you’re alright with it.”

“Of course I’m alright,” Amélie said, talking around the spiky ball of lead that was forming in her stomach. “You’re not even sure it’s her.”

“But _you_ are. I can tell.”

“Admiral, if you think I have too much of an emotional stake, then—”

“You have _just enough_ of an emotional stake,” Ana corrected, “and if I were going to pull you off the mission for being passionate I wouldn’t have brought you here in the first place. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Amélie looked away, flushing slightly. “…Who’s the team?”

“Yourself, Wilhelm, Brigitte…and Fareeha.” Ana shrugged before Amélie could comment. “She wanted out in the field. The fact that she made the trap – and best knows how to deploy it – gave her leverage in that regard.”

“I’ll take care of her.”

“As I’d expect from you regarding any Overwatch agent, Odette. But only to that point. She knows what she’s signing up for, and her safety is not the primary objective of the mission.” To someone who didn’t know Ana Amari as well as Amélie did, she might have sounded casual, almost callous, about sending her daughter into the line of fire. But Amélie heard the note of strain in her voice.

“Understood.”

“You didn’t answer before; how soon can you fly out?”

Amélie set her empty cup of tea down on the Admiral’s desk. “I’m already gone.”

\---

“Approaching drop site, ETA three minutes.” 

Fareeha grinned. It was _so good_ to say that! She’d been pilot-certified on Sparrow aircraft for almost five years, but this was her first run outside of training and recertification.

“Equipment check and soundoff,” Brigitte said. “Jeanne, ready.”

Amélie was folded into the corner, her head resting on her knees. Fareeha thought she was asleep until her head rose a fraction of a degree. “Odette, ready.”

“Reinhardt, ready!”

Fareeha paused. “Fareeha, ready.”

“We’ve got to get you a code name if you’re going to be coming out with us,” Brigitte said.

“Hey now! What’s wrong with using her real name?” Reinhardt puffed his chest up in an old military-poster pose.

“That’s something old guys do,” Brigitte said, punching her mentor on the arm. The clang of metal on metal was deafening even over the roar of the repulsor engines.

“Actually, she is not wrong,” Amélie said without raising her head. “Reinhardt, Morrison, McCree…”

“See? Spring chickens!” Reinhardt chuckled.

“Not sure Jesse counts,” Fareeha said. “He picked that name to begin with. And I’m _going_ to choose a codename. I just don’t have one _yet._ ”

She turned her attention from the pre-drop banter to focus on the landing. Sparrows had fully vectorized propulsion thanks to their repulsor engines, and could even be left hovering unattended, but it still took care and attention to fly in low amongst the buildings, a haphazard mix of old Spanish colonial architecture and shiny new Lumérikar spires.

“Hey,” Fareeha said as they approached the huge pyramid in the middle of town. “That’s not supposed to be on fire, is it?”

Brigitte came forward and leaned against the vacant copilot seat. “Not usually, no.”

Smoke billowed out of an angry red gash in one corner of the pyramid, the gray plume obscuring half of the old Lumérico logo. Now that they were a little closer, Fareeha could see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles clustered around the base. A VTOL branded with the markings of a private fire department rose from the ground, wheeling like a distressed firefly, making a wide detour around the pillar of ash.

“Ah,” Amélie said from behind her, making Fareeha jump. “Well, that’s a pretty good sign that something odd is happening, no?”

They found the target rooftop, which was one of the newer non-Lumérikar buildings in town. The four of them scrambled down the entry ramp, then at the touch of a button on Fareeha’s pad, the door swung shut and the Sparrow shot straight up into the cloud cover. One uneventful round of BASE jumping later – repulsor technology made for a good short-range parachute replacement, too – and the fireteam filed into the alleys of Dorado.

Fareeha knew her role in this mission; she was no soldier. As the pilot, tech, and signals expert, she was expected to wear many hats, and the last of these she pulled on now. She and Winston had put their heads together on some ways to deal with Pulsar, and the first step was finding the woman herself. 

To accomplish this, Fareeha’s pad, far from standard issue even on a boring day, was set up to track temporal variations. Its screen flashed glaring white all over, and Fareeha swore and nearly dropped it. “Wait. Hold on.”

She fumbled with the gain controls as the other three looked expectantly at her, each of them more in their element than she was. She finally found the controls and turned down the sensitivity. The glare resolved into a wireframe map of the surrounding city streets, overlaid with a slowly swirling gradient glow. “There’s temporal distortion _all over_ ,” she said. “Really strong. We should be able to find specific hotspots still, but…this whole area is saturated with energy signatures similar to Pulsar’s.”

“We’ll wait for you to find something more specific,” Amélie ( _Odette_ , Fareeha reminded herself, codenames while on a mission) said. She was leaning against the wall in the small alley, next to a very faded piece of graffiti reading LO- M-----OS. Odette seemed as aloof as ever – “ballerina bitch-face,” she had told Fareeha once after a couple glasses of wine – but as soon as she heard Pulsar’s name she fixed her gaze on Fareeha with an uncomfortable intensity.

“I, um,” Fareeha stammered. The readings were a little vague, but they wouldn’t get anywhere standing in an alley. “This way.”

The rest of the team passed her with easy efficiency, and Fareeha did her best to keep up, muttering under her breath about impostor syndrome.

Dorado was a city torn between two extremes. The buildings held extended clans with centuries of family history, shops that had been open for decades, and the kind of architectural chaos that came from people organically adding to their living space as they needed it. But the ubiquitous security cameras and Lumérikar corporate propaganda showed how thin that façade actually was. There were little things, too: a lack of children’s toys in the road, the strict curfew keeping civilians indoors even when they should have been pulling together as a community, the humming quiet. They didn’t see a single soul as they picked their way across the maze of narrow streets, only heard the occasional hastily-slammed shutter.

There seemed to be two strong signals amidst the ambient temporal distortion. One was stationary, in the direction of the fissure in the pyramid. The other was in a similar direction, but definitely mobile. Oddly, it didn’t seem to be moving in discrete jumps, as Fareeha would have expected from Pulsar, but rather in a smooth, stop-and-go pattern.

After a handful of minutes of skulking through the eerie half-light of broken LED street lamps, the signals were distinct enough to tell apart. “We’re getting close.”

“Ambulance!” Reinhardt hissed, holding out a treelike arm to keep the group close to the wall.

A wailing siren blared by on the narrow, one-way street the alley opened into. The flashing dot on Fareeha’s map moved with perfect synchronicity.

“She’s on the ambulance.”

“What?” Odette leaned over, looking at the map.

“See?” Fareeha pointed.

Without warning, Odette vaulted up on Reinhardt’s shoulder, then up the wall in three quick scrambles to the Spanish tile roof on that side of the alley. One vault over the gap between them and she was out of sight with a rapidly fading _tap-tap-tap_ of her boots on the roof.

Jeanne sighed and unslung her mace. “Well, so much for subtlety.”

“She could just be doing recon?” Fareeha suggested hopefully.

“How long have you known that girl?” asked Reinhardt. “Twenty euros says she crashes the ambulance before we get there.” He braced himself against the wall. A glow from his rocket pack already cast shadows on the stucco walls. “After all, we are chasing the woman who killed her husband.”

\---

Tracer was not having a good day.

She was in something resembling an office building. There was a huge hole in one wall, showing a cloudy night sky above her, and fire alarms shrieking everywhere. She picked herself up from a half-reclining position against a ruined desk and took a quick look around her.

The Slipstream engine was nowhere in sight, which wasn’t surprising. Massive time jumps tended to interact in odd ways with the rotation of the Earth. Things ended up miles away if you were off by just tenths of a second. With a catastrophic explosion like that…who knew?

There wasn’t anyone injured nearby, and thank God for that. Whatever place this was must have emptied out for the night.

Tracer did a quick inventory. She hadn’t had any major time-related mishaps since learning to use her accelerator, but the possibility was scary enough that she had a mental checklist prepared for it. 

First, she needed to figure out where she was. She made her way over the rubble to the nearest gap in the outside wall, in what used to be a glass-front corner office. The desk in the middle was just a pile of plywood with bits of a computer terminal sticking out of it and smoking; the window was empty, glass shards sparkling on the carpet. 

Dorado spread out down below, distinct in the streetlights, and beyond that, the glimmer of the ocean. The city wasn’t exactly as Tracer had just left it, though. There were more steel-and-glass spires than she remembered, and more docks, with bigger ships moored to them. And, strangely, there were no cars on the streets other than a handful of emergency vehicles. She filed that away for later.

Second, Tracer had to figure out _when_ she was. This wasn’t her present, for sure. Certainly it wasn’t the past. Enough time had elapsed to build several skyscrapers...years must have gone by. But somehow, for all its growth, the city looked dead.

Tracer’s accelerator was completely drained after the stunt with the Slipstream engine, maintaining enough power only for the base function of keeping her grounded in the timeline. It would recharge itself over time, but until then, she didn’t have access to any of her tricks.

Third, she had to get to safety. The stairs, then.

She followed the dimly glowing _SALIDA_ signs through the growing haze of smoke leaking through the ventilation system from the lower levels. She frowned a little at an employee motivation poster – what the hell was Luméri _kar_? – but kept her pace quick right up until the floor fell out from under her.

It was slow at first. Just a slight lurch, just enough to make her stumble a little. Then, with a terrible grinding noise, an entire slab underneath her tilted downwards. Rebar ground against concrete and gravity tipped forty degrees to the side as the collapsing floor settled into an angle of repose.

Her first instinct – attempting to Recall – just made her temporal accelerator give a pitiful low-battery _beep_. More mundane military training kicked in and she dropped into a clumsy roll before she impacted the industrial carpet of the level below. She breathed heavily in three-point-landing position while the tremor subsided and the rest of the rubble of that floor fell around her – including a particularly large chunk of ex-ceiling that blocked off the stairwell door on this level.

“Rats.” Surely there was another staircase – but after that shake, who knew how stable the floor was going to stay? She had to get out faster than that.

Pyramids were sloped, right?

A few seconds of picking her way across more wrecked office furniture led Tracer to the edge of the fissure in the pyramid. This was definitely a teleportation-related mishap; the sharply-defined, glass-smooth edges of the cut left no doubt. Below her, pipes and wire conduits were sheared through as though cut with a giant knife. Water poured out in a few places where the plumbing’s integrity had failed. The way the gap was angled put her in an odd position, as she would have to scramble around the cut corner, before getting to the sloped glass side. The drop from that height was not insignificant.

“All right, Amélie. Let’s see how good of a parkour teacher you’ve been.” Free-running had been therapeutic for Amélie during her recovery. It was a way of exercising, keeping a connection to her teenage roots, and also spending more time with Lena. Lena wasn’t a rank amateur (she was a city kid too, after all), but the way Amélie moved was an inspiration. She couldn’t do her girlfriend’s grace any justice, but she could at least keep herself from crashing and burning. Probably.

Tracer followed all the steps – planned her path, tested her footing, and launched herself up, across a short divide, under that piece of rebar, and…Yes! She landed hard on her bum, overcorrected a bit, but she was able to get herself headed the right direction in just a few seconds.

She was sliding more slowly than she’d feared. At first this seemed great – she’d avoided injury so far, and she might get lucky again. But the slow descent also attracted unwelcome attention.

A black VTOL with the strange, hybrid Lumérikar logo drew level with Tracer. A side hatch opened, and a black-suited figure leveled a gun at her. She tried to blink, tried to recall again – nothing. Just the squeal of skin on glass, the _thwip_ of a tranquilizer dart, and blackness.

\---

Tracer’s eyes shot open. The haze around her thoughts lifted rapidly; thanks to her temporally advanced metabolism, she burned through most drugs in a matter of moments.

Moments were all that was needed for the black-clad PMC troops to strap her down to a gurney in an ambulance. She tested her limbs and found them all quite securely fastened. Her pulse pistols were in a tie-down box across from her, and her accelerator was hanging on a hook on the far wall; thankfully, close enough to keep her anchored.

Two goons disguised as paramedics were sitting on the bench seat, chatting in muffled Spanish. They didn’t seem to notice she was awake; she could use that. Once her accelerator recharged enough, she’d be able to slip her bonds one way or the other, but that would take an hour. She was unlikely to be able to talk her way out of the situation, not knowing more Spanish than _where is the bathroom?_ and _Real Madrid play like a bunch of tossers_. Maybe she could fake some kind of illness?

The driver started shouting about something, drawing the thugs’ attention. If she was going to act, now was the time. Her accelerator needed some time to recharge to do anything specific, but…

Tracer closed her eyes again. She imagined a red pentagon on a black background, the smell of peppermint, and a squeal of electric guitar feedback. It took a little longer for the chip in her brain to pick up on the debug code than the ones she used every day. The chip didn’t have a great way to feed her information back straight to her brain, so instead she heard a pleasantly neutral voice through the auditory implant on her jawbone. “Debug mode initiated.”

Tracer flicked her eyes up and down as the chip read out the options to her. This was much easier when she accessed the diagnostics on her pad, but she was incredibly glad the option existed now. After what felt like an hour, she reached the option she was looking for.

“Are you sure you want to reset the accelerator? Chronal stabilization functions will cease for duration of reset. Please input debug code if you’re sure.”

 _Never been less sure about anything_ , she thought.

Pentagon. Peppermint. Jimi Hendrix. And suddenly, Tracer came untethered.

She flicked her eyes open, although it didn’t really help. The space between moments wasn’t a place that could easily be processed by the human visual cortex. The objects and people around her appeared, but shadowy and afterimaged, possible futures shedding off in slow motion like smoke vortices off a jet’s wing. She watched her bonds very carefully. They were mostly stable, but – there was something faint coming off her left arm. Some timeline where she _was_ and the strap _was not_. She pushed toward it, like swimming across the current of a freezing river, feeling a sickening lurch as she spanned herself across two forks in reality –

“Reset complete. Reverting to emergency power supply. Full charge in one hour and twenty minutes.”

The world clicked into focus and Tracer came back into herself. Her left arm was out of the restraint! She untied the strap on her other arm with shaking fingers, glancing over to see what the driver had been yelling about.

There was a woman on the hood of the car, pointing a gun at the driver. The glaring lights of the ambulance made it hard to make out her features, but she couldn’t assume that it meant good news for team Tracer.

Tracer finished getting her straps untied and lunged for her pistols and accelerator, dropping into a crouch on the diamond patterned steel of the ambulance’s floor. One pulse pistol rest against the torso of the one nearest her. “Hands in the air.”

From her new vantage point, Tracer could finally see what the driver was yelling at. The windshield caved into a shower of safety glass, revealing a lean figure crouched on the hood of the van. Her hair was different – a pixie cut an awful lot like Tracer’s, actually – and her skin wasn’t blue.

But that was Amélie.

\---

Amélie’s world retracted to a focused pinpoint. Her combat training (which was not all that different from her ballet training) moved her almost without her volition. The truck underneath her swerved, and she shifted her balance to match it. The driver turned to look at something behind him, and she brought the butt of her pistol down on the windshield.

“…Love?”

She had told herself she was ready for this. She’d faced off against Pulsar before. She had long since learned to tamp down the complicated knot of emotions surrounding the cadet she had known as a close friend… and the monster wearing her skin who had killed Gerrard. It wasn’t about vengeance, or salvation, just duty.

And with a single look into perplexed brown eyes, the cork came off. Amélie froze. Some things dominated all of her attention: The hair, too short. The accelerator, blue instead of crackling sickly red. Other things escaped her attention entirely – like the third soldier in the truck swinging the barrel of his rifle around to her.

The woman in the ambulance darted forward and slammed into his arm before he could fire, but took her attention off the other enforcer. He took her on the neck – a clumsy punch, but one with enough power to send her sprawling. The soft _thump_ of her body impacting the seat jolted Amélie out of her reverie. This was where she had to trust her team. “Reinhardt, now!”

The roaring of a jet engine answered her. Amélie rolled past the driver to scoop up the stunned brunette and ducked back out the windshield just in time for the ambulance to vanish out from under her. It spun out, its own momentum combining with four hundred kilos of power-armored German, and tipped over, scraping along the paving stones of the narrow sidewalk.

Amélie landed none too gracefully, but at least didn’t incur further injuries. Brigitte and Fareeha hustled over after a moment, following Reinhardt like a contrail. Brigitte gasped. “Is that…?”

Amélie stood slowly, nodding. She handed the smaller woman, who was just starting to regain consciousness, to Fareeha. Fareeha clipped a glowing metal bracelet around her arm. “This will keep her from flickering away.”

“I expected her to look different,” Brigitte said.

Amélie looked away. “So did I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Infinite thanks to Emma for beta!


	3. Intersection pt. 2

“Accelerator not in range. Reconnect to accelerator to access debug functions.”

Tracer growled. She was getting really sick of the cadence of that message. She hadn’t been out of range of her accelerator since Winston had given it to her. It had been a while since she needed to sleep with it on – Emily had broken her of that particular neurosis, and thank God for that – but the risk of destabilizing if she got separated from it was too great. Pretty much the furthest away it had been was on the hook in the bathroom when she showered.

And yet…she was stable. The horrible ghost realm, the abyss between one tick of the clock and the next, was nowhere to be seen. Just a gray brig cell. It wasn’t a torture chamber or anything; there was a toilet, and a decent bed that folded out from the wall, with a mattress and clean linens. But there were no windows and the door locked from the outside, so a brig it was.

Tracer picked at the bracelet. She got the same feeling from it as her full accelerator – someone had miniaturized the technology, which was impressive enough – but it was also more stifling. If her regular accelerator was a seatbelt, this one was a straitjacket. She couldn’t get her internal clock to synchronize.

They’d left her a stack of MREs and a big jerrycan of water. She made herself a “tandoori-style chicken” (a cruel joke) and sat down to think.

The biggest question was where and when she was. Her initial thought was that she had ended up in the future somehow; that was the easiest answer, but Brigitte looked the same age. Fareeha looked _younger_ somehow, but maybe that was just the haircut. And Amélie… Well. Doc Ziegler had said the cellular modifications were irreversible. Widowmaker, _her_ Amélie, was going to be blue and chilly forever. The woman who pulled her out of the burning wreck of an ambulance in Dorado was certainly not.

So, barring some kind of dream scenario, Tracer figured she was in an alternate timeline. She knew intellectually that these existed, had felt them bumping like sharks at the edge of her awareness when she recalled, but she’d taken pains to avoid them. She’d never expected to hit one quite _this_ strange.

Hopefully the quality of this “food” wasn’t indicative of the state of the world at large. What a dystopian nightmare that would be.

Tracer pushed her food around in the tray, appetite unusually low. She was probably on a ship, given the gentle rocking motion and ever-present hint of nausea. In Dorado, they had blindfolded her, cuffed her to a stretcher for the second time in as many hours, and transferred her into a VTOL. It wasn’t any model she was familiar with, by the engine noise, but she hadn’t been entirely focused.

And then, into this cell. After a couple of minutes, the cuffs had popped open automatically, and she was free to make herself some awful curry. That had been…a day ago? Two days? It was hard to tell.

“Accelerator reconnected.”

Tracer shot up on her cot. She could feel it! It was faint, but her accelerator was in range! It should be fully charged by now, so she should be able to –

The lock clicked before she could try blinking away. The door cracked open an inch. “Can I come in?”

Tracer shrugged. “I don’t think I’m the one who gets to decide that, love.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t be polite.” Fareeha came in, carrying Lena’s accelerator in one hand and a stack of clothing under her arm. “My name is Fareeha, by the way.”

“Er, right.” It certainly _was_ Fareeha, but at the same time, this woman carried herself with a different bearing, her customary military stiffness replaced with a more civilian type of awkwardness. “I’m Lena.”

“Right.” Fareeha tugged on her braid, avoiding eye contact. “You already know me, don’t you? And introducing myself like that was super awkward?”

“Let’s go with…sort of?” Lena sighed. “Can you at least tell me what’s going on?”

“I’ll explain everything – well, everything _we_ know – while I give you a tour of the ship.”

“Just like that? You’re letting me go? Not that I’m not grateful, Fareeha--”

“We’re not…exactly letting you go. We’re putting you on parole.” Fareeha pointed to the bracelet. “That’s not just a temporal inhibitor. It’s got tracking, and it’s nearly indestructible. Here.” She handed Lena the stack of clothing and stepped out, shutting the door behind her. “Get dressed and I’ll show you around.”

Tracer’s suit was soaked in fear-sweat, so it felt good to get out of it. Her new clothes were just an Overwatch logo T-shirt, sports bra, and sweatpants; they were all a bit baggy, but at least they were clean. She spoke as she stripped down. “Okay. First of all, I think it’s pretty clear to me that I’ve fallen into an alternate timeline.”

Fareeha laughed. “Oh, Jesse won’t be happy about that. He had ten bucks riding on ‘rogue Talon clone.’”

“Yeah, I’m not…that.”

“Or so you say.”

“If you thought that was even a bit likely, you wouldn’t be letting me out of the cell.”

Fareeha was silent for a moment. “You got me there.”

“So,” Tracer said, “I want to figure out the point of divergence, here. You all clearly know who I am, but you’re surprised to see me. Where…exactly is my counterpart in this timeline?”

Fareeha was frowning when Lena stepped out of the room into the hallway. “Follow me to the rec room and I’ll show you.”

The rec room was just a couple doors down. Tracer took in as much as she could during the short walk: standard industrial carpet, white metal walls (bulkheads? She thought they might be called bulkheads), doors marked with numbers. A floating office building, in other words. Clearly Lena had not been in a high security cell -- or maybe this version of Overwatch figured that the safest place to hold someone was right in the middle of a bunch of superpowered law enforcement officers.

The rec room was small but somehow they fit an elliptical, a full weight bench, and a couch into it. The couch held a familiar face in a familiar ten-gallon hat. Lena grinned -- the more friendly faces she saw, the better. And this one hadn't changed a bit. “Hello, Jesse.”

“Mornin’.” He nodded to her, then glanced between her and Fareeha. “So, Fareeha…”

“She’s not a clone, Jesse.”

“Well, that’s ten dollars well spent,” Jesse said wryly, pulling a bill out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Fareeha. “So…Lena? Your name’s still Lena, right?”

She nodded. “Or Tracer. Been going by that long enough that I’ll answer to it in a crowd.”

He sucked in air through his teeth. “Might wanna keep that one under your hat. Got…sorta bad associations there.”

“Are you having a competition to see who can hint the most cryptically?” Tracer snapped. She felt a bit bad about that, but at the same time… she had plenty of reason to be peevish.

“She doesn’t actually know.” Fareeha shot her a sympathetic look and gestured to the TV, where Jesse had been watching a Korean pro Starcraft 4 tournament. “Put on the news. You can fanboy over D.Va’s micro later.”

Jesse shrugged and poked at something on his pad. “Throwing her into the deep end, huh?”

“The sooner she knows what’s going on, the sooner we can all find out what’s going on.”

The screen cut to helicopter footage. The bottom third informed her that this was a view of Asunción, Paraguay. A massive crater was smoldering in the middle of an intersection, glinting glassy in the afternoon sun. The buildings that were visible weren’t faring much better than the road, and at least one of them was on fire.

The reporter cut in mid-sentence. “—Two hours ago, and emergency crews are still assessing whether further survivors of the attack need to be evacuated.”

“This isn’t the right…Hang on.” Jesse poked some more, and the video skipped to a bookmark.

“Law enforcement officials have confirmed for us that this is the work of the Talon terrorist Lena Oxton, alias Pulsar. Talon’s motivations for assassinating President Gomez y Castillo are as yet unknown, but it seems likely that she was the target of the attack. We have some high-speed security footage of Pulsar as she appeared in the middle of the motorcade and placed the bomb.”

A short, grainy clip played slowly. Between frames, a woman cut across the screen like a bad splice. She was holding a pulse bomb in one hand and something in a wrapper in the other. In the next frame, she had already moved to one of the limousines in the middle of the motorcade. In under three seconds, she had planted three bombs: one on each of the decoy limousines. The woman's long, unkempt brown hair whipped behind her, and she systematically ate the thing in the wrapper as she blinked around. Each time she moved, shadowy potential futures rippled off of her in waves, as though she were a living fragment of the space between seconds.

Jesse paused the video. “You need a moment? You’re clenching your fists pretty hard, there.”

Lena scraped her attention away from the scene towards the angry red half-moons her nails were leaving on her palms. “Fuck.”

She approached the screen. Fareeha might have said something comforting, but it drowned in the pounding of Lena’s heartbeat in her ears. “Fuck. _Fuck._ That’s me.”

“It’s not you,” Fareeha said. “If it was, you’d be in a much more secure cell on the ship. Or dead.” She gestured at the screen. “Mum was one bad cup of tea away from throwing you in a deep, deep hole for the rest of your life. We thought it was some kind of Talon trick – that they faked deprogramming you to get you into the bowels of Overwatch. She was really mad we even picked you up, actually.”

“Or, you know,” Jesse said. “A clone.”

Lena shook her head. “When? When did Talon get her?”

“’67. Late spring. Six years ago.”

A slideshow played in Tracer’s mind. Her mentor, restless with anxiety and grief. His relief when he'd brought his wife home from the hospital, his frustrated late-night video call to Lena when he couldn’t get his love to warm up. Widowmaker never spoke about that night. Just thinking about it seemed to break something inside of her, and Lena hadn’t tried to push. 

“In my timeline,” Tracer said, “it was Amélie. They took Amélie, and she killed Gérard and half-blinded Captain Amari…oh god. Is Gérard still alive?”

Jesse glanced at Fareeha and shook his head slowly. “They took his protégé for good reason – Pulsar killed him first. And caused a lot of other damage in the meantime.”

“There we have it,” Fareeha said.

“Then Amélie…she was never taken?”

“No. After Gérard died, she started combat training. Took to it faster than anyone I’d seen,” Jesse said. “She-- she was in my corner through the whole Blackwatch thing. So I helped her work through Gérard’s death by training her. She’s one of our best field assets.”

Tracer sat down heavily on the couch. “And clearly a lot of other stuff’s changed since.”

“We’ll get you filled in,” Jesse reassured her. “I’m waiting to get rotated back into the Numbani operation; I’m off duty today.”

“I have to get back to the lab,” Fareeha said. “We’ve got a contract to analyze some of the debris from the attack and Winston needs all hands on deck.”

“I’m glad the big guy is still here,” Lena said. “Mind if I come with?”

Fareeha and Jesse exchanged another one of those looks. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Fareeha said.

“Yeah, Lena, we’ll… go see him later. He’s pretty dang busy.”

“This is so hard.” She rested her head in her hands. “I’m sorry. It’s just so much to process. And I miss my girls.”

“You have kids?” Jesse asked.

“No, no, my girlfriends.” Lena snapped her head up. “Hey. Well, I have some good news for you about Pulsar.”

“What?” Fareeha asked.

“Widowmaker -- my Amélie, that is, that’s what Talon called her, and she still… anyway. She defected. She’s not the same Amélie Lacroix that was taken by Talon that day, but she’s not _theirs_ anymore, either. Assuming that the same process that turned Amélie into Widowmaker is the one that turned Lena into Pulsar...”

“I’ll talk to Winston about it. That _is_ good news, but there’s a lot of ifs in that. And we’ll want to ask you for more details. What was that you said about girlfriends?”

“Um. I was dating a girl named Emily while Amélie was…slipping out of Talon’s grasp, I suppose. That ended up being a whole thing.” Lena sighed. “This is weird. I remember asking both of you for advice when that happened. Part of me feels like I shouldn’t have to explain it again.”

“Wait,” Jesse said.

“Oh, no,” Fareeha said.

“You – Lena – and your world’s version of Amélie – are dating?”

“It doesn’t count,” Fareeha said.

“…yes?” Lena looked between the two of them. “What?”

“I’m gonna need that sawbuck back.” Jesse held his hand out to Fareeha.

“It doesn’t count! It’s not _our_ Amélie.”

“If we’re getting any proof at all, this is it.”

“Ugh, fine.” She pulled out the same bill and handed it back to him.

“You know,” Lena said, “it’s not technically _my_ love life, but I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with you betting on it.” 

\---

“You know, you don’t have to hover. You could go say hello to her.”

Amélie looked up to find Fareeha stepping out of the rec room. “I wasn’t hovering.”

“And I’m sure that while you were _coincidentally_ standing outside the room containing the alternate timeline version of your nemesis, you didn’t happen to hear anything about deprogramming, or her dating her world’s version of Amélie?”

“Maybe I don’t believe in any of this alternate timeline business.”

“Oh, you do too. Is there any other good explanation? Winston’s lab test is a formality at this point.” Fareeha turned, putting a hand on Amélie’s shoulder. “You’re sharper than this, Amélie. Are you going to tell me what’s really getting to you?”

Amélie scoffed, but the remark had hit its target. “You’re not my therapist.”

“If you would actually _go_ to therapy, that would mean something.”

“You’re not my _mother_ either.”

“You’ve seen the role model I have. Trust me, if I was being _motherly_ , you would _know._ No. I'm just Fareeha, your field support.”

“I have to check something in the lab,” Amélie said, conceding the point. “Walk and talk?”

Amélie took a couple of minutes to find the words. The familiar corridors took no thought to navigate at this point, so she had the luxury of speaking carefully. “I thought we were so close,” she said finally.

“To catching Pulsar.”

“ _D’accord_.” Amélie sighed. “Every time we fight, there’s something behind that mania that I just can’t place. I'll admit I’ve been spending too much time tracking her movements. I feel like a cliche, but I can’t rest until we catch her. I used to think that was a figure of speech.”

“Not that I’ve been in your situation, but I think you’re just fighting for Gérard’s sake. Which is understandable.”

“Mm.”

Fareeha raised an eyebrow. “Is something wrong?”

“Do you remember the Dubrovnik mission, when it was my turn to pick the music in the VTOL?”

“I do. Some kind of old French electronica. That was Gérard’s favorite, right?”

“That’s exactly it. I didn’t even remember until Reinhardt pointed it out to me. And…the other day, I realized that I couldn’t remember what Gérard’s voice sounded like. I watched a recording to remind myself, and it hurt, but it didn’t hurt _enough_.”

Fareeha nodded slowly. “I hate to say it, but that sounds pretty normal. It’s been six years. You’re just healing.”

“Am I still chasing her for him? Or for myself?”

“Does it matter?” They stepped through the first door in the decon airlock to the _Ziegler_ ’s onboard lab. The conversation paused in the loud airflow as the lock cycled. “Getting her out of Talon’s hands is good one way or the other. And, you know, meeting the other Lena, I realized that we’ve been thinking of Pulsar more and more like an enemy and less and less like one of our own who’s being used.”

The lab housed both the medbay and the engine shop, separated by a plastic curtain to keep iron filings out of the medical equipment. A figure could be seen near omw of the workbenches on the shop side. “ _Hej_ , Amélie, Fareeha!” Brigitte stepped out, wiping grease off her hands with a rag. “If you’re looking for Winston, he’s in the tank for another hour. He says it’s acting up worse than usual today.”

“That’s fine,” Amélie said. “How’s that lab test?”

“It’s pretty conclusive. Radioisotope markers in the blood draw definitely come from a different timeline.”

“How can you tell?” Amélie asked.

“Well, in general, we can’t,” Fareeha said. “Not with what we know about chronophysics, which is very little.”

“But?”

“But there are markers within a person’s chemical makeup that indicate a world with a different history.” Brigitte shot a chart over to Amélie’s pad. “Every time a nuclear bomb explodes, it changes the radioisotope balance of the entire atmosphere, after it’s had long enough to mix. Same for the amount of, say, coal smoke in the atmosphere. Pretty much everything has traces of different radioisotopes, that tell all kinds of things about both that organism’s history and the history of what it’s eaten.”

“And this…alternate version?” 

If Fareeha noticed her inability to say the woman’s name, she didn’t say anything. She craned her neck over Amélie’s shoulder to read the report. “This Lena Oxton is definitely, genetically, Lena Oxton. But she comes from a world with a slightly different number of nuclear explosions – slightly fewer, to be precise. And she grew up with a different mix of chemical pollutants.”

Amelia pursed her lips. “Can that be faked?”

Fareeha shook her head. “After a full day of cycling stuff through her system? No. Not unless they somehow raised a clone of Lena, from birth, in a hermetically sealed dome where they also grew all the food that they fed her. And if Talon has that kind of foresight and resources, we’ve already lost.”

“Which means,” Brigitte said brightly, “that we’ve just had a big advantage drop into our lap. An experienced agent with a personal stake in Pulsar’s capture and an insight into her psychology.”

“Not to mention experience with Talon’s programming process.” Fareeha shot Amélie a sympathetic look. “We can talk about this later if you’d rather.”

“I’m fine.” In truth, she just wasn’t able to process it. How _should_ one feel about a what-if like that? While this “Widowmaker” was very real to the newly arrived woman, she was a distant abstraction to Amélie. “Apparently in this other timeline, Amélie was captured by Talon instead. And they managed to mostly deprogram her.”

“We’ll have to sit down with Lena and get as much as we can,” Brigitte said.

“She seems to know me on the other side,” Fareeha said. “Don’t know about you, Bri. But she and her version of Amélie are…involved. She probably trusts Amélie more than anyone.”

Amélie shot her a look. “I know what you’re going to suggest, and no, I will not debrief her. Get someone else to do it.”

“I’m with Amélie,” Brigitte agreed. “There’s a difference between rapport and super awkward para-time romantic tension.”

“Besides,” Amélie said, “I think Jesse’s doing just fine.”

\---

Jesse had no idea how to handle this.

Lena was still staring at the screen. He had to admit, it was damn disconcerting to compare the two. He was so used to seeing Pulsar in news briefs that he had gotten used to how she looked. But next to the universe-next-door’s version, Pulsar looked wrong. Inhuman.

“Why’s she so skinny?” Lena asked.

“We think they cranked her metabolism way up when they captured her. She’s gotta eat a whole mess of calories to keep going. Brigitte said she thinks it’s somewhere north of four hundred an hour. Hence the stick of butter.”

That startled a laugh out of Lena. Maybe that was the trick. She seemed a lot more like the Lena he remembered when she was happy. “Butter?” she repeated incredulously.

“Ten thousand calories a day? She ain’t eating kale.” Jesse waved at the screen. “Cowhands used to bring a big ol’ block of hard cheese with them, same reason. They needed more protein, though.”

Lena gave him an odd look. “What?” he asked.

“Thank you, Jesse.”

“What for?”

“For being exactly the same,” she said, smiling slightly.

Something broke free inside Jesse, like a breath he didn’t know he was holding. It was good to know that some other version of him out there was doing well; it was even better to have her here with him. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you, I’m actually an alien on this side.”

Lena nodded. “Well, that figures.”

“And I decided to stop watching spaghetti westerns and got really into Takashi Miike instead.”

“That’s less believable than the alien bit.”

Jesse grinned. “I wish it was under other circumstances, but I’m happy to have you back, Lena.”

She leaned back. “I could use a bitter.”

“I’ve got Four Peaks.”

“Gross. Gimme.”

He grabbed the beers out of the fridge, tossing one to Lena. “So. Any questions?”

“Loads. I can’t think of anything specific now, though.” Lena looked back at the screen. “This is kinda dominating my attention at the moment.”

“Then can I ask _you_ a question?” Jesse pulled a bottle opener out of his pocket and opened both bottles. “Don’t answer if it’s not okay.”

“Shoot.”

“What happened to Blackwatch on your side?”

“Well, you got out, Genji is doing fine. Can’t say the same for the rest of them. Public wasn’t real happy about it when they found out, you know? Petras pulled strings, got Overwatch outlawed. We’ve only just reformed, illegally.”

“ _Outlawed?_ Wow. Guess the grass ain’t always greener. We had trouble with Petras but we were able to disavow Blackwatch.”

“Having Amélie’s family’s money probably didn’t hurt.”

“Nah. She’s not on great terms with them. She really helped, but not her connections. Just having her there as a friend got me through some dark shit.” He took a drink. “We’re still around but we ain’t exactly popular.”

“Well, as long as you’re still doing good, that’s all that matters. Heroes never die, and all that.”

Jesse felt a twist in his gut. “Lena…you didn’t happen to see the name of the ship on the way in, did you?”

She frowned. “I was in the middle seat of a helicopter with a blindfold. I couldn’t see _anything_.”

“Angela died in the destruction of our headquarters. This ship is named after her.” Jesse looked down into his bottle. “‘Heroes never die.’ Huh. That’s something I haven’t heard in a real long time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to Emma for beta!  
> Gerard was a Justice fan, in case you were wondering.


	4. Intersection pt. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A whole bunch of stuff conspired to keep me from editing this chapter; hence, the month long gap. Fortunately none of that stuff kept me from writing, only editing, so I've got four chapters of backlog now...

Lena’s cramped room aboard the _Ziegler_ was starting to feel a little like home. Her time in the RAF conditioned her to adapt quickly to a new place, a new bed; routine had been drilled into her as surely as flight reflexes.

Here, that routine was frustratingly empty. She got up, ate in the canteen, made small talk with Jesse and Fareeha, occasionally got dirty looks from Amélie. She moped around, tinkered with her accelerator, missed her girlfriends, and got the runaround from the entire crew when she tried to talk to anyone other than Fareeha, Jesse, or Brigitte.

She was, in a word, sick of it. And it hadn’t been a week yet. The room may have started to feel like home, but _not_ in a good way. So, when she heard the knock on her door frame at midnight ship’s time, she was more excited by the change in routine than frustrated by the interruption of sleep.

“’Ello?”

“Lena, this is Ana. I’m sorry to wake you. I’d like to talk.”

“Er, yeah. One sec.” Lena threw on one of her slowly accumulating stash of borrowed Overwatch t-shirts (still with that _slightly wrong_ logo) and a clean-ish pair of trousers before opening the door to admit Ana and – somewhat surprisingly – Amélie.

“Thank you, dear.” Ana perched on the chair in the corner of the small cabin, and somehow made it look official. Amélie leaned against the wall, crossed her arms, and stared off into the distance. “How are you settling in?”

This was the first time Lena had seen this version of Ana. Like with nearly everyone else, the experience was disconcerting. The lack of eyepatch made her seem a little younger, but she held herself with a different sort of dignity. Her Ana was a lone wolf, the Shrike of the desert, used to the liberty of making decisions only for herself. This Ana was a leader, carrying the weight of the whole organization on her shoulders.

Tracer saw very little point in lying to her. “Kind of shitty, actually. Near bouncing off the walls.”

Ana nodded. “I’m sorry, and I understand. You do understand the legal problems you’ve landed in, though?”

“Yeah. I don’t exist. Lena Oxton exists, but she’s a fugitive, and most of her credentials are probably scrubbed anyway. I’m not saying I don’t appreciate you sheltering me, especially given what I was probably facing in Dorado…”

“No, no. This isn’t about gratitude.” Ana waved the idea away. “You’re one of ours. Maybe from a…distant branch of the family. Still family. But your situation – and, to be honest, the fact that we still can’t trust you one hundred percent – has meant we need to maintain a level of operational distance. We _have_ been making preparations.”

Lena sat down on the bed. “I’m listening.”

“We have some blank cover credentials in escrow, for use in covert operations with no lead time. We pulled one for you. You’re Tracy Cheval, a British citizen who was until recently living in Mexico City.” 

Ana handed her a packet of identification and Lena peered at the plastic chipcard in the front.“Tracy? Well, I guess it’ll be easy to answer to, at least.” 

“We have a contract to help train Numbani’s police and self-defense forces,” Ana said. ”You’ve been seconded to Overwatch as a defense analyst for that deployment.”

“All right, that sounds good. I can do analyst.” She started flipping through the few pictures in the dossier. “What do you mean, contract?”

“A contract is an arrangement between two parties where goods and services are exchanged.” Ana raised an eyebrow. “What did you think?”

Lena shrugged. “I just think it’s just a little silly to call it a contract when we’re sent to help out, you know?”

“When we’re providing material and strategic aid to a sovereign national government in return for money? No, it’s actually quite serious.”

Lena dropped the stack of documentation. “ _What?_ ”

Ana blinked. “Did I say something wrong?”

“You’ve turned Overwatch into a _mercenary company_?” Lena’s breath hitched on a barb of anger. “What the hell?”

“Lena, I don’t think you –”

“Don’t you ‘ _Lena’_ me! I fought for Overwatch for most of my life! I went through the closest thing to _actual hell_ for Overwatch! Where do you get off throwing all that away for a paycheck and a fancy boat?”

Ana frowned. “It’s not—”

“I didn’t realize that I’d somehow landed in the _evil_ mirror universe. Maybe I should see if Talon’s recruiting.”

“You ungrateful _ass_ ,” Amélie snapped from her corner. Lena had almost forgotten she was there. “What the fuck do you think happened when Petras started wagging his _zob_ all over the UN? We lost our funding. It was disband, or go rogue. No guardian angel was going to save us – the only angel we had died in a pile of rubble in Zurich. Ana and Morrison gave everything to keep us out of _prison_. Of course we still protect people. We just have to do it in a way that keeps the lights on.”

Anger and shame reacted like baking soda and vinegar in Lena’s stomach. “I’m sorry, but...there had to be another way.”

“What? Going to jail for some juvenile idea of ideological purity?” Amélie sneered. “Maybe we _should_ give you back to Talon, if we offend your _delicate sense of propriety_ so much.”

“That. Is. Enough.” Ana held up a hand. “Lena, I know where you’re coming from. I heard most of that from Jack when we made this decision. I said most of it to myself. But you’re going to have to deal with it if you want to survive on this side. We’re the only allies you have right now.”

Lena broke eye contact with Amélie. “I’m not happy about this.”

Ana looked sympathetic, but she didn’t soften. “You don’t have to be happy. You just have to pretend to be Tracy Cheval while we figure out how to get you home.”

“...okay. Fine.”

“Are you ready to hear about what you’ll be doing?” Amélie asked. “Or do you need some more tantrum time?”

“ _Amélie_.”

Lena snorted. “Why did you even bring her with you?”

“Because,” Ana said, “Amélie has been running OpSec for our Numbani operation for a year, and we need to get you debriefed before the VTOL leaves in an hour.” She leveled a look at both agents. “But if you two can’t work together, I’ll go wake up Jesse and have him do it.”

Amélie inhaled sharply as if to snap off a reply, but it never came and she slumped back against the wall again in a ready position. “No. I can do it. I’m sorry.”

That posture was so much like _her_ Amélie that Lena’s insides hurt. “I can’t promise that I’ll…be okay with what Overwatch has become. But I’ll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s enough for me.” Ana stood. “I actually _do_ need to wake Jesse up. I’ll let you get to it.”

She left the door open behind her, disappearing into the darkness of the hallway.

“I’m not debriefing you in your pajamas,” Amélie said, a taut wire of tension in her voice. “Come on. Get dressed and we’ll do this over coffee.”

\---

Fareeha never tired of watching the approach to Numbani. The Sparrow dropped out of the clouds, and the endless white gave way to a sparkling cityscape of emerald and citrine sprouting out of the edge of the savanna. Her favorite thing about Numbani was that it was beautiful in a fractal way, from the geometric layout of its streets and buildings, to the unified architecture in its straight lines and smooth curves, to the incredible variety of its people – human and omnic both – walking through the streets.

“Overwatch cruiser, designation Zulu Lima One Victor Three Five. You are clear to land on pad eleven. You’ve got visitors waiting for you.”

“Thank you, Air Control. On final approach.” Fareeha could do this approach in her sleep at this point; all the better to gawk at the scenery on the way down. She drummed her hands on the yoke in excitement.

Adawe International had a separate terminal for private and charter flights: a group of satellite pads off the large ones that the big carriers used. Each one was painted with a digital mural commemorating some part of omnic history, painted and designed by local artists. The pad where Fareeha was assigned showed a picture of the Prague Omnium, the first to offer a peace treaty near the end of the Crisis. There was a small crowd of people waiting for them in the glassed-in corridor of the terminal, and as Fareeha guided the VTOL to a stop, she recognized one tall blond figure in particular.

“Fareeha,” Jack Morrison said as she passed through the security gate. Lena, Amélie, Jesse, and some other familiar faces streamed past her on their own errands, many of them stopping to chat with the Overwatch agents who had come from the city bureau to greet the incoming passengers. “Good to see you. Heard you got some excitement in Dorado?”

“Maybe more than I expected, Commander. Thank you for the extra training. It came in handy.”

“No problem. I get why your mom wants to keep you out of the field, but you’re one of the sharpest Overwatch has. Glad to see she’s being a little more flexible with your deployment.”

“About that. You’ve been briefed on our guest?”

“Tracy? I hear she’s a long way from home.” There was a twinkle in his eyes. “Ana gave me an executive summary, but the details of her home timeline have only gotten here in fits and starts of rumor. Pretty sure the one about the alternate version of me being a famous stuntman got distorted in the telling.”

“I haven’t heard about that. But…apparently, Mother faked her death on that side. Their Fareeha joined the military – left a private military contractor position to join Overwatch when they reformed it a year ago.”

He whistled. “That’s got to feel strange.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to process.” Fareeha shrugged. “That seems to be how it is for everyone. It’s an odd combination of too abstract to think about and too personal to stop thinking about.”

“I’ll have to buy her a beer and ask her what I’m like on their side.”

“If that stuntman thing is true, _I’ll_ buy you a beer.”

Jack chuckled. “You’re on.”

“So what’s with the personal reception?”

“We have a new contractor that was dying to meet you.” He waved at two figures hanging back in the terminal. One was a girl, in her early teens at most, with dark, bushy hair and a brilliant smile. The other was a massive quadrupedal omnic, painted in the city’s colors of green and gold. “This is Efi Oladele and Orisa. Efi, Orisa, this is Fareeha Amari, senior engineer.”

Efi bounced over to them. “Hello! I’ve read about so much of your work.”

The huge omnic approached behind. “According to Efi, four percent of my design was inspired by your mechanical insights.” Her voice had a metallic accent, almost musical.

“So you’re kind of like her aunt,” Efi said.

“I’m really just a technician,” Fareeha said modestly. “Any advances I’ve made were just compensating for lack of resources. I’d love to chat with you two about Orisa’s design sometime, though.”

“Orisa is a prototype for a possible long-term law enforcement program for Numbani,” Jack said. “She’s undergoing training and evaluation to see if we want to roll out similar repairs to the rest of the defunct OR15 units.”

“Similar, not identical,” Efi said, with a hard edge to her voice. Fareeha got the impression this was an argument she’d had many times. “We would be making people. Heroes. Not automatons for an army.”

“I have been optimized for individual deployment, or as the anchor of a mobile fireteam,” Orisa said. “I have been working on fine tuning my situational awareness protocols for peacetime support and emergency response as well.”

“We’ve had some problems with the HPS,” Jack said. “Not that we don’t always, but there’s been some cyberwarfare from them lately that I want you to look into.”

“Ugh.” The Human Preservation Society, a group of human supremacist terrorists masquerading as a so-called “legitimate political interest,” had been the number one complication in Overwatch’s security contract with Numbani. Fareeha was as wary of them as any well-informed Numbanian would be. “I’d be happy to.”

Jack nodded. “Also, our new contractor will be running drills and combat simulations. I’d like you to participate in some of them, if you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. I’m going to go prep the debrief for this deployment.” Jack clapped her on the shoulder. “It’s good to have you around again, kid.”

“You too, Jack.” Fareeha gave him a quick hug. When he had left, she turned to Efi and Orisa. “I’d love to talk shop with the two of you, but I just got off a four hour flight. Know any good places around the terminal to eat?”

Efi grinned. “Do you like parfait?”

\---

“Jesse,” Amélie said, “That’s ridiculous.”

He tilted his head so only his grin was visible under his hat. “Of course it’s ridiculous. That’s why it’s funny.”

“A blue and black cape? A crash helmet? _Non._ I refuse to believe that people are even entertaining the notion.”

“Honestly, Jack might prefer people knowing that version to the real one. Le—Tracy told me the real story about their Jack. It’s mighty sad.”

Amélie looked away, out the window of their rented autocar. “Sad stories aren’t in short supply.”

“No, they’re not. But this one’s pretty bad. I don’t think our Jack and her Jack would get along very well.”

The unspoken question hung in the air. Would _she_ get along with the other world’s Amélie? Surely they were just as different. But the way that woman looked at her, when she thought Amélie couldn’t see…

Jesse had known Amélie long enough to know when he had set off one of her moods, so he kept his mouth shut for the rest of the drive while Amélie tried to stuff herself back into her professional role. By the time it dropped them off at the Numbani liaison HQ, she was outwardly calm again.

The headquarters were in fact a large office space within the Numbani Palace of Justice. The city-state was only three years old at this point, but the architects of the city had given plenty of room to grow. The Supreme Judiciary and the various law enforcement appendages put together barely filled up one of the grand building’s three wings. Overwatch’s Numbani operation took up a fraction of the east wing, across from the rest. Jesse and Amélie passed the statue of Gabrielle Adawe in the atrium on their way through the mostly-empty corridors to Overwatch’s borrowed auditorium.

They were among the first there. Jesse pulled out a sketchbook and began to draw; Amélie got caught up on some paperwork that had fallen behind in the tumult of the past week. Jack came in shortly after, talking to “Tracy” in hushed tones, and then a mix of Overwatch trainees and Numbani police. Last was Fareeha, with a small girl and a huge horned omnic. They stayed to the back; there was an open area for non-humanoid omnics who didn’t fit comfortably in standard seats.

“Good evening,” Jack said, after people had settled in. “I’ll make this short. We transferred in some personnel yesterday, in preparation for ramping up our training scenarios. For our ethics and sensitivity training, we have brought in Epsilon Eze, professor of synthetic philosophy at the University of Numbani. They’ll also be working with city government to set up the internal affairs division in a way that will discourage corruption, so they’ll be working closely with us here.”

An omnic waved from the front of the room. Epsilon Eze had a heavily modified humanoid body plan, including an extra set of hard-light arms and a head frilled in rainbow holograms, like a neon lionfish. “I’m excited to be working with you all,” they began. “I was a junior partner in the committee that drafted Numbani’s charter – it was very important to us that we avoid the mistakes of the past in building our new future. A big part of that is ethical law enforcement. I’ll be serving as a guide and advisor to make sure that corruption and abuse are discouraged by the _structure_ of our justice system, rather than trying to fix it after the fact.”

“I like them,” Jesse murmured as the omnic left the podium.

“And for our combat training,” said Morrison, “we have Tracy Cheval. We’re working with her to develop some new scenarios. We’ll be closing the streets for a full-scale simulation sometime next week. I’ll let her explain further.” He waved her up to the microphone.

“Um… hi.” Lena tapped the mic, swallowing hard. “Hard speech to follow, that! I’m just here to make sure you can work as a team and deal with unexpected threats. Here’s what I have in mind for the first exercise…”

\---

Amélie wanted to leave as soon as Tracer was done, but Jesse put a hand on her shoulder. “Come on. We need to meet the new recruits.”

“Must I?” she grumbled.

“Alright now,” Jesse said, “what’s your deal?”

“There is no _deal_.”

Jesse glanced over to where Amélie was pointedly not looking, where Tracer was talking animatedly with a huge centaur-shaped omnic. “You’re gonna have to have a normal human conversation with her sometime, you know.”

“I briefed her before we came here. It was fine.”

“So it takes a direct order from Ana to get you to do it? Sounds like a _deal_.”

She rolled her eyes. “It is not like you to meddle, Jesse.”

“Aw, now, that ain’t true. How long have you known me?”

“Excuse me, Jesse McCree?” said a softly accented voice from behind Jesse. He turned to find Epsilon Eze, their bottom pair of arms fidgeting.

Jesse nodded politely. “Howdy, doctor. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve been following your career closely,” they said. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

“Someone has a fan,” Amélie muttered.

“Not…exactly,” Epsilon said. Their holographic crest flickered indecisive blue-green for a moment. “You are…a case study. In law enforcement ethics. You show up in textbooks sometimes.”

Jesse felt a twist in his gut. “Now, hold up a second.”

He felt the reassuring pressure of Amélie’s hand on his shoulder as she stepped between them. “If you’re here to grill my partner about Blackwatch,” she said in a low, even tone, “you should rethink that.”

They held up their top pair of hands in a placating gesture. “No, no. I mean – yes, I have questions related to Blackwatch. But I’m not here to yell at you about it. I did my doctoral dissertation on a cross-sectional analysis of the fall of Blackwatch. That analysis is part of why I’m in the position I am, here.”

“And what does this have to do with me?”

“There are holes in the story. Things that don’t add up. If we’re going to prevent another Blackwatch from happening here in Numbani, we’re going to need to piece together the whole story.”

“That’s it,” Jesse said, brushing Amélie’s hand off his shoulder and turning to go. “I’m done.”

“Okay. I tried to be politic about this.” Epsilon’s crest flashed violet. “We have the same job – to make sure Numbani’s police force is constructed well from the ground up. But if you want to storm off and make both of our lives harder, that’s your prerogative. I’ll just have to find another source.”

Jesse faintly heard Amélie say something to him, but he was already out the door of the auditorium. He followed the emergency exit signs to a back door and stepped out into the soggy Numbani heat, to a loading area behind the Hall of Justice. Nobody was around, although there was a truck parked next to the dock. He stood against the cool concrete wall, head turned up to the sky. VTOLs swooped by in the distance every few seconds, and a few birds hopped from roofs to wires overhead. The city drone faded to a hum at the back of his awareness.

It just wasn’t fair. He had the bad luck of being the last Blackwatch member who wasn’t dead, in prison, or training at a robot monastery. There were more thinkpieces written about him than he could possibly find the time to read. And yet, as the public face of the disaster that was Blackwatch’s fall, he had been interviewed and harassed for years about things he had no say in. He and Genji had been kept in the dark the whole time – sure, he could have dug harder, but if you can’t trust your own organization you might as well quit.

He heard boots approaching him in a familiar gait, but he didn’t turn to look. “Amélie.”

She dug around in her purse for two syntharettes and handed one to Jesse wordlessly, pulling the tab on her own and hanging it from her lip.

He took a drag on his own. No proper stogie, but it would do in a pinch. He slowly felt the knot of anxiety in his shoulders begin to loosen. “Well, that wasn’t particularly pleasant.”

Amélie gave a very Gallic shrug. “They are young. They were probably not far out of the AI creche when Blackwatch fell.”

“Still doesn’t give ‘em any damn right to interrogate me about it. After eleven billion other people did.”

Amélie didn’t answer for a while. “I wasn’t using their age to justify their actions,” she said slowly. “I was pointing out that they might have less reason to judge you when you tell your story.”

Jesse leveled a hard stare at her. “I don’t need to ‘tell my story.’ My story sucks and nobody needs to be hearin’ it. Especially not some ivory tower type usin’ me as a _textbook example_.”

“I can’t make you talk to them. But I really think you should.”

“Hrm. Meddling isn’t much like _you_ either, Lacroix.”

Amélie stubbed out her syntharette and flicked it onto the street, where the microbes in the paper activated and began decomposing it into ash. “Well,” she said, turning to walk back into the hall. “Maybe it should be.”


	5. Intersection pt. 4

“You’ll be playing both sides of this situation,” Tracy Cheval said. “You’ll start by defending the payload. The attacker’s staging area will be Okowe International Terminal B; we’ve got multiple flanking paths. If they’re able to drive you back from it, it turns into a running fight; we’ll drive the payload at about a walking pace down Union to the approach to the museum. Secondary staging areas should be marked on your HUDs.”

Orisa raised her hand. She’d never been to school, but people raised their hands in the holodramas that Efi watched, so she assumed it was the proper thing to do. Apparently she was right, because Ms. Cheval paused. “You have a question, Orisa?”

“What counts as a hit?”

“Two shots to the limbs or one to the torso or head,” said the cowboy McCree.

“And what about me?” said Shi, an omnic from China who was in the shape of a limbless dragon. Her head rose out of her silvery coils with an ironic tilt.

“Your smaller target profile makes up for the fact that your whole body is a one-hit target,” said Amelie Lacroix, the one known as Odette. She was Efi’s favorite Overwatch agent – other than Orisa’s auntie Fareeha, of course.

“Oh, yeah, that’s fair,” McCree grumbled. “Some of us work better at range, you know.”

They spent the few minutes of setup delegating roles. Orisa was very new at squad combat, but she always got the same role – anchor – and it was one she was happy with. Of the other two omnics, Shi was a flanker and Diamond (a very serious humanoid from Australia) was the sniper. The humans, Ibrahim and Ndidi, were both recent transplants to the city from Nigeria, as were most of the human population. Ibrahim was a scout and Ndidi was a generalist, formerly of Lagos PD SWAT.

Orisa set up her shield at a choke point between two streets while Diamond took a high ledge overseeing the payload and Shi and Ibrahim darted off into the alleys. Normally this part of town would be fairly busy at this time of day – Orisa had worked traffic here more than once – but the government had shut down the incoming streets for the duration of the exercise.

“You don’t move anything like them,” Ndidi said from behind her. She was doing an equipment check, tucking her puffy hair underneath a helmet.

“Pardon?”

“The OR-15s.” Ndidi clicked her helmet strap. “I had just moved to the city when they were introduced. In those few short weeks before Doomfist took them apart.”

“They were simple,” Orisa said. “They were self aware, but had nobody to teach them about life. That is why they failed.”

“Is it true that Efi built you to fight Doomfist?”

“I am designed to protect the city.” Orisa paused. “But yes. I will bring him to justice. It is…more than just programming, it is _my_ desire.”

“Hostiles incoming, lower right,” Shi’s voice came through Orisa’s antenna. Almost at the same time, Diamond’s sniper rifle cracked off a shot.

The Overwatch team came in hard and fast, pouncing like cats. Orisa had to reposition her shield to cover two different angles of attack, Ndidi darting in and out of cover as the attackers shifted strategies. She only caught sight of Shi and Ibrahim occasionally, as they were both busy in amongst the streets and alleys of downtown Numbani. Ibrahim was an accomplished free runner, calling out enemies and tossing biotic aid packs down from the spires. Shi used every meter of her snakelike form to advantage, closing to short range and sending the attackers back to their staging room with an enthusiasm Orisa found a little distressing.

The defenders fought hard and cleverly. Orisa felt a flash of triumph when she used her gravitic arrester to pull McCree off a ledge and into one of Diamond’s snare traps. However, the attackers had experience and mobility on their side. After Ndidi and Shi took paintballs from Tracy’s pistols in short succession, the attackers pressed their advantage and overwhelmed the defense, commandeering the payload.

Shi and Ndidi waited for the other three outside their rendezvous point. “We should set up at the straight section of street right before the turn into the courtyard,” Ibrahim said. “Hard for them to get around us there – Shi and I can watch the approach.”

“I copy,” Orisa said.

Ndidi frowned. “They’ll be expecting that. That kind of positioning is classic Overwatch tactics.”

“It’s classic because it works,” Diamond said softly.

“Wait, wait, shh.” Ibrahim held up a hand. “I hear something.”

Orisa cranked up her auditory sensors. “Boots,” she said.

“They’re coming around behind,” said Ndidi. “Expecting us to stick together for the defense, trying to scatter us before that can happen.”

“Wait,” Shi said. “There’s more than three of them.”

Five figures in black appeared to the right, down the longer part of the L-shaped alley that had their rendezvous point at its elbow. Orisa had dropped a shield long before they were visible, and machine gun fire crackled off of it immediately. Distorted, staticky voices echoed down the walls as the commander of the five waved two of his troops over to cut off the other mouth of the alley. The Numbani PD squad didn’t need to hear the whining charge of the sergeant’s Gauss shotgun to know who this was.

Talon was in Numbani.

\---

“They’re going to want to dig in at that straightaway,” McCree said.

“Classic Overwatch,” Lena said, grinning. She hadn’t had this much fun since the accident. She couldn’t use her accelerator – she was still wearing the inhibitor, partly because she was still under house arrest, partly so she didn’t blink by reflex and blow her cover – but that just added to the challenge. The Numbani squad was _good_. Lena had heard stories about a unique omnic built by a prodigy keeping the peace in Numbani, back in her home timeline, but had never met Orisa or any of the others. When she got back home, she’d have to look them up.

“Scatter them,” Amelie said. “HLF tactics. They’ll need to know that sooner or later.”

“HLF?” Lena asked.

“Human Liberation Front.” Jesse snorted. “Buncha anti-omnic loonies. Four sticks short of a sawhorse, every last one of ‘em.”

“They’re—” Amelie’s reply was cut off by a distant sizzle of machine gun fire. “Shh.”

Lena looked at Jesse. He nodded, and gestured twice. Overwatch hadn’t changed their hand signs between the timelines – he wanted Amelie and Lena, the short range fighters, to split up and go around while he took the high ground.

She missed her accelerator. The inhibitor was less bulky but didn’t let her use any of her tricks – blowing her cover would be bad, but dying would be worse. Still, her training wasn’t entirely built around her temporal abilities. Sometimes all it took was quick thinking and a pair of pulse pistols... and those, at least, she still had on her.

As Lena broke off on her own, she heard returning fire, and a high pitched whine followed by a deafening crack. She ran harder, feeling like she was sinking into the rubberized pavement with each step. The gunfire was coming from the convention center where the Numbani PD squad rendezvous point was set. Lena touched her throat mic and switched it back over to the all-hands channel. “This is Tracy,” she said. “Coming in on your position. We’re cancelling the exercise.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ndidi said dryly. “If you come in the right side you’ll be able to flank them. Talon. Orisa’s set up defense so we’re pretty well dug in.”

_Talon?_ Tracer thought. _What the hell are they doing here?_ Sure enough, though, three of the characteristic black suits were in front of her. Even in a world where Blackwatch was disbanded before most of the catastrophes of her timeline happened, Talon managed to build enough technology and personnel to be a major threat.

But not these in particular.

The commander was winding up that awful Gauss shotgun for another crack at Orisa’s shield, which was starting to show webbing cracks. The two grunts were just hammering away at the shield with their ARs. None of them noticed Tracer sprinting around behind them and kneecapping them with her pulse pistols. They gave out a brief radio squawk and crumpled to the ground gracelessly. Lena snatched up their weapons before they got any smart ideas.

Orisa dropped her shield and the other two omnics surged forwards to deal with the downed Talon troopers. “Good work,” Lena said.

“Aha,” Orisa said with her eyes smiling. “It is good to know that the actual foes are much less clever than our allies.”

“Nobody here,” McCree said in Lena’s earpiece. “Odette?”

“One trooper neutralized.”

“Wait,” Orisa said. “There were five of them.”

A revolver snapped twice in the distance. “Dunno what they do at Talon HQ,” Jesse said over comms, “that makes these guys dumber’n a bag of bricks.”

“Took care of the last one?” Amelie asked.

“He fell for the old rock throwing distraction. Who does that?”

Lena chuckled but Amelie just sighed – businesslike as always. She came and rejoined the rest of the group, tucking a small pistol into the back of her catsuit. “We need to call this in. Talon wouldn’t just send a tiny squad into downtown Numbani for no reason.”

“Already on it.” Tracer flicked her throat mic to the emergency all-Overwatch channel. “Soldier, this is Tracy reporting in. We’ve got a major situation.”

A pause. “...Soldier?” Jack said. “Haven’t been called that in a long time.”

“Er. Yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. We’re dealing with some issues ourselves. Status?”

“A Talon hit squad ambushed the defense team on their way out of rendezvous.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Amelie flinch at her pronunciation. “They’ve been taken care of but they can’t be alone.”

Morrison growled under his breath. “That explains a lot. We’ve been getting reports from around town, but we have a problem of our own. We were going to wait until the operation was over, because it’s not completely confirmed, but…well. There was a Pulsar sighting downtown.”

“ _WHAT?_ ” Amelie snarled. “Here? Where?”

“I’ll shoot you the coordinates and converge with you there. Tracy, McCree, take the Numbani PD squad and start sweeping the streets.”

Amelie immediately grappled up the wall out of sight. Jesse waved his hat at her in farewell.

“If they’re spreading themselves that thin,” Lena said, “they’re trying to distract us from Pulsar. We should go too.”

“And we’re going to give them that distraction.” Morrison said. “We’re not overwhelming her with force, we’re taking her down with Fareeha’s tech. We can’t let a bunch of Talon goons run rampant in the meantime. We’re here to protect Numbani. Pulsar is only part of that.”

Lena sighed. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t worry. You can trust us to take care of this. Morrison out.”

Orisa came up to Lena. “Ms. Cheval, Mr. McCree, we’re with you. Where are we going?”

Jesse spun the chamber on his revolver and dumped a handful of fresh rounds into it. “You heard the man. Let’s take out the trash.”

\---

Grand Terminal, the central train station in Numbani, was the most gorgeous building in a city with no lack of competition. The wide plaza in front of the central arch was one of the most iconic locations in the city, the kind that shows up on postcards. The Three Pillars, massive statues of the three founders of the city, stood sentinel around a large oval fountain of brass and marble. It had the kind of beauty that made its surroundings feel shabby. Even Numbani Central Power, which would be a heritage landmark in most other cities, looked dull and industrial across Grand Avenue from the glittering Terminal.

Amelie dropped down off the roofline three blocks away. She cut through heavier-than-usual foot traffic to the location Morrison had marked on her map, where Overwatch and Numbani PD had already established a perimeter around the Terminal and displaced several civilians – who had then crowded as close to the crime scene cordon as they could get. Fortunately, 175 centimeters of ex-ballerina with a murderous scowl was more than a match for the rubberneckers, and most of them skittered away from her.

“Odette.” Morrison was standing at parade rest, hands behind his back. 

Ballet cockiness crashed against decades of military calm and came back out a little worse for wear. Amelie bit back the comment she had prepared. “Sir.”

“Fareeha’s holed up in the power plant as a base of operations. We think she’s trying something with the trains.”

“They’ve got lots of monitoring equipment in here,” Fareeha said into her earpiece. “I’m repurposing some of it to boost the temporal distortion tracker. The stuff they use in the central plant here is actually derived from some of Winston’s early temporal accelerator designs, so it’s a good fit.”

Amelie shifted. “Any clue what Pulsar is doing here?”

“There’s no obvious assassination target in the vicinity,” Morrison said. “Could be she’s a distraction from the real goal.”

“Yeah, but…” Fareeha sighed. “Show her the tape, Jack.”

Morrison flicked a file from his tab over to Amelie’s. It was shaky handheld footage with the watermark of a popular video uploading site, but the resolution was high enough to make the content clear. Pulsar – a black and red blur, a familiar ghost – sat cross-legged atop one of the Three Pillars. Probability shadows shedded off of her in torrents, but the main image stayed still, eyes closed. The sound attached to the video was crowd noise with a distorted, crackling buzz underneath.

Suddenly, one of the shadows solidified as Pulsar leapt off the statue, lancing forward through the air to land on the upper mezzanine of the station. She disappeared into the roof trusses, and the video dropped down again to show the camerawoman, a very excitable young humanoid omnic, before cutting to black.

“We got the video just a few minutes ago,” said Morrison. “This occurred about an hour ago. Since then, there have been sporadic accounts of her around the roof of the station – messing with some kind of device, tampering with the power lines, just sitting on a ledge and staring off into the distance for a few moments.”

Amelie retrieved her pistols. “Do you have another inhibitor?”

He nodded. “Three. One for each of us, plus a backup that I can leave with you. If anyone’s making the collar, it’s going to be you.”

Amelie took the proffered bracelets and tucked them into a belt pocket. “Same mechanics as last time,” Fareeha said, “with a few improvements that Le- that _Tracy_ suggested. She thought the old model might have a few loopholes that I tried to close here. Just get it around any of her limbs and the shock to her system should be enough to knock her out for a second or two. She shouldn’t be able to blink – although I don’t know what it’ll do to the probability shadows.”

“I’ll sweep the rear entrance,” Amelie acknowledged, and took off at a jog.

The back entrance of the terminal was less aggressively picturesque, but beautiful in a more utilitarian way. Greenwalls were a constant of life in Numbani – the city had been designed green from the ground up in more ways than just color scheme. They filtered the air, controlled the humidity, smelled nice, and – most importantly to Amelie – provided lots of metal trellises to use as handholds. The rear of the station was sun facing, and so it was covered in easily scalable greenwalls. She took advantage of them gratefully and levered herself onto the roof.

“On the roof in the rear of the building,” she said.

“I have eyes on you,” Morrison replied in her ear. “See anything?”

Amelie scanned the horizon. There were crowds of curious people at the edges of the security tape on both of the major streets the station opened onto. A couple of them looked like they were pointing at her – probably more because of her little parkour stunt than because they actually recognized her. Other than that… “I don’t see anyone,” she said.

“Hey,” Fareeha said. “Check the power lines going into the terminal. Most of them are grounded but I think there’s some on the roof too. One of our eyewitness accounts mentioned Pulsar messing with the power lines somehow.”

Amelie flicked on her earbud camera. “Guide me in.”

She watched her step as Fareeha talked her over to the edge of the roof. The whole surface was solar paneled, and the morning’s brief rainshower had left them slippery. “Why do they have power lines with all this solar on the roof?” Amelie asked.

“The roof provides enough to run the terminal but not enough to run the train,” Fareeha said. “The train grid is wired directly into the fusion reactor here, so the solar grid has extra power that they parcel out to the local buildings.”

Amelie reached the first of the junction boxes, mistaking it at first for one of the ubiquitous HVAC vents that were on every roof she’d ever been on. “Is there any connection between those grids?”

“Just the telemetry data that goes into the monitoring here,” said Fareeha.

“Out of curiosity, what delivers that data?”

“I’m not totally sure,” Fareeha said. “Little box, black probably, clamped around a cable with an antenna on it?”

“Yeah.” Amelie raised up one of the cables. The box was there, but there was also a second, cruder device duct-taped around it, with wires poking into holes drilled in the casing. “So this isn’t yours.”

“That’s…definitely not ours.”

Amelie tilted her head and studied the device. “Do you think it’s a bomb?”

“Hmm...the chemical sniffer on your pad isn’t picking up any explosives.”

“We’ve got something else,” interrupted Morrison. “Come down here. Northbound tracks, west side, near the back.”

“On my way,” Amelie said. “What is it?”

“Looks like a bomb, maybe. A bit slapdash. It’s tied into one of the main power boxes.”

“Let me take this one off the roof conduit for a comparison.” Amelie pulled a multitool from her bodysuit and clipped a few wires, disconnecting the device.

“Wait,” Fareeha said. “What did you just do?”

“I disconnected the device from the monitoring box.”

“Serial number N63GL?”

Amelie knelt down next to the box and examined the other side. There were a bunch of tool marks around where the holes were hacked in, but the serial number was still mostly visible. “Yes.”

“The telemetry on that one is going crazy. That one’s saying something in the terminal is drawing a whole bunch of power, but the rest of them are fine.”

Amelie dashed to the side of the roof and dismounted, entering the terminal through the rear arch. The cavernous interior of the station made its sole occupant look tiny, like a doll in an out-of-scale dollhouse. Jack was crouched, looking at the power junction in the gravel train bed by the maglev track, when Amelie approached him and handed over the device she’d found.

“Looks like the same construction,” he said. “Odd. Talon’s usually neater than this.”

“Shit,” Fareeha said.

“What?” Amelie and Morrison responded in unison.

“All the rest of the power monitors are showing the same three seconds on repeat. They’re getting fed false data. The real readings are the crazy power draw -- they’re routing it back through the solar power grid for some reason. Don’t touch the one by the tracks.”

“Why the train station, though?” Jack said. “We checked the time tables. There aren’t any persons of interest or sensitive material traveling through today.”

“Well,” Fareeha said, “There’s got to be a good--”

Her voice cut out in a burst of static as the lights in the station died. A fraction of a second later, there was a muffled, earth-shaking thump from the direction of the power plant.

“Go check on Fareeha,” Jack said, voice strained. “I’ll sweep the perimeter.”

Amelie vaulted onto the platform and sprinted towards the plaza. Her legs burned as she pushed them as hard as she ever had on stage. As soon as she was in the clear, she could see the pillar of inky black smoke already starting to rise from the right side of the power plant across the street. Pedestrians and onlookers were scattering, alarmed. 

Amelie urged herself to go faster, push harder, _anything_ to get to the scene soon enough to help. Visions of Gerard’s blackened, headless body came to her unbidden. Not again. She couldn’t lose someone to Pulsar again.

The glass front of the power building was half-shattered, blown out onto the steps by the force of the explosion. She danced into the minefield of shards, ducked through the hole left by the ruined sliding door, and careened around the reception area into the heart of the facility without absorbing much of her surroundings. The door to the control center was pressed from metal, with a biometric scanner.

It was also blown in half and laying in the hallway.

Amelie skidded to a stop. The control room looked like a war room from an old Cold War film, or like mission control for astronauts, with flat screens arrayed on one large wall and rows of work desks with their own individual terminals. All of the monitors were shattered or flickering, filling the room with jagged fields of shifting light. Part of the ceiling trusses had come down on a row of workbenches in the middle.

Hundreds of people could work in this room at one time, although they seldom needed to. There were six that she could see now, and maybe more cowering out of view. Amelie scanned the room for familiar faces; it was hard to see in the nightmarish light but none of them looked like Fareeha’s.

But the Overwatch uniform was unmistakable. And the only Overwatch uniform in the room was underneath the fallen ceiling trusses.

It felt like she was swimming through gelatin. The air itself resisted her as she knelt next to Fareeha’s figure. The tech’s eyes were wide, and her face was white with shock. There was a pipe through her. It poked out, ghoulishly red, just underneath her ribcage on the left hand side. More red was on Fareeha’s lips. They moved. Sounds came out. Amelie had to force herself to understand them.

“Figured…it out,” Fareeha said.

“We’ll get you help.” Amelie touched her earbud. “Medical! Now! Agent down in the middle of the control room! May be others hurt!”

“No.” Fareeha grunted in pain. “I mean, yes. Medical…would be nice. But no. She’s…feedback to the central core. There’s a stabilizer. In the reactor.”

“Wait,” Amelie said. “Slow down.”

“This was her target all along,” Fareeha said. “I’ll…ergh. I’ll explain later. Just go. Three doors to the…left.” She reached down, agonizingly slowly, unclipping something from her belt. “My key card. Go.”

Amelie hesitated.

“Fuck. Amelie. Go!”

Letting out a long, shaky breath, Amelie took the card with hands that felt like rubber. She barely registered the rest of the people in the room. The hallway blurred past her with no real sensation of movement. She must have used the keycard, because the door slid open for her and she stepped through.

Just as soon as she did, it slammed shut behind her. She turned. The lock light was red; the safety lockdowns were in place. Not even Fareeha’s keycard could open them now. Only the director could lift the emergency lockdown.

As she stared at the door, processing this information but not really comprehending it, she felt a flash of infrared heat behind her, and heard a crackling burr of energy. The sound carried with it a voice -- a voice that was distorted, broken, but still horribly recognizable.

“Hello, _love._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Events in the Voltron fandom have impressed upon me the importance of setting consistent audience expectations. So I’m just going to say this outright:
> 
> (fic spoiler alert)
> 
> -
> 
> -
> 
> -
> 
> Fareeha isn’t going to die. She’s hurt, but this is the _beginning_ of her arc, not the end.
> 
> -
> 
> -
> 
> -
> 
> (end spoilers)
> 
> Also, I had some fun designing possible power kits for Orisa’s squad, and thought I’d share them with you.
> 
> Diamond- Main weapon is a cross between Widow’s Kiss and Zarya’s cannon – a scoped, long range beam sniper with a warm up period. His Shift is a super jump, and he can perform an extra jump off of walls to get up high. His E is a snare that he can leave somewhere, like Junkrat’s trap except completely invisible and it restrains the victim to a small area instead of immobilizing. His ultimate blinds enemy players in an area.
> 
> Ndidi – Attack hero a lot like Soldier. Her AR fires three round bursts, her E is a remote incendiary grenade that she has a regenerating store of three. Her Shift has two modes, like Moira’s orb – left click rushes her forwards, right click bounces her backwards out of danger. Her ultimate is basically a Splatoon bomb rush – infinite grenades for a time.
> 
> Ibrahim – Can climb walls like the Shimadas. Main weapon is a short scattergun, a bit like Reaper’s. His E puts a temporary buff on an ally and on himself that gives them essentially Reaper’s passive – they heal when they deal damage. His Shift is a net that slows enemies briefly. His ultimate lets him briefly run around walls without limits, and any damage dealt to him or someone in his radius is also dealt to the dealer.
> 
> Shi – Melee flanker. Main fire is a fang strike, secondary is coil to gain power. Shift is a lunge that constricts opponents. Her ultimate is basically a global version of Shield Bash or Flashbang that hits all enemies simultaneously.


	6. First Interlude

Amélie still couldn’t feel the cold.

It had been more than a year since her defection from Talon, and much about her behavior had changed in that time. Her thinking was no longer clouded by the constant looping noise of Talon’s brainwashing. Her empathy was beginning to grow back from the stunted nub it had been ground down to. But all the mental changes in the world couldn’t revert the changes to her body: her heart still beat twelve times a minute, she still only consumed a thousand calories a day, and extreme temperatures still didn’t affect her. She hadn’t shivered since the day Gerrard took her home.

That didn’t stop her from shaking with anger when she heard what Morrison had to say. “What the fuck do you mean, _operational liability._ ”

“I _mean_ ,” Jack said, enunciating each word like a pulse rifle round, “we still have to be careful. The Petras act never went away, we’ve just convinced a few countries to not enforce it. Between the collateral damage from Dorado and pressure from Lumérico, Mexico is on a knife’s edge of revoking that privilege.”

“So, what? We’re just giving up on Lena? Los Muertos is our last lead to where that device came from.”

“I understand how you feel,” Jack said calmly. “You know that Winston is working on it.”

“Winston is _tinkering_ in his _lab_.” Amélie slammed her hand down on Morrison’s desk. “Even if he comes up with something, she is likely still in Mexico.”

“And if we determine that we need to go there, we’ll work towards getting the Mexican government to allow an exploratory mission. But we’re not going to just go haring after ephemeral leads.”

“I’m not going to go blow up the city. I just want to look around, ask some questions.”

“Let me be perfectly honest with you, _Widowmaker_. Tracer’s good opinion is what brought you into the fold. You’re not exactly trusted here.” He took off his visor to make a point. Milky eyes peered at a point a couple inches to the left of Widow’s head. “I trust Lena, Lena trusts you. That gets you conditional approval from me. But not everyone is so accommodating – and to the countries currently supporting us, a lone Widowmaker on an unsanctioned mission is indistinguishable from a Widowmaker reverting to her Talon programming.”

Amélie glares at him. “Do I have to give you _blood_? I’ve been working for you for ten months. I’ve worn _this_ damn thing--” she pointed to the tracking anklet on her left foot-- “for that entire time. Every second of my life has been monitored and recorded. I’ve had less privacy since defection than I did in Talon. And now you tell me that I can’t go after the _one person_ who has apparently been keeping me out of prison?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.” Morrison put his visor back on. “Listen. I know exactly how you feel. You think I’m happy just cutting her loose? There are bigger things at stake here than any one of us individually.”

Amélie spun on her heel and left his office without another word. He said something behind her. She didn’t particularly care.

The halls of Watchpoint Gibraltar were still mostly empty. Her memories from before Talon were still fuzzy, like broad brushstrokes on a distant canvas. That said, she still remembered many more people here from when she had spent time with Gerard on assignment. These wide, empty spaces suited her better. She exited the corridor into Aerospace, the biggest building in the facility, and grappled up to one of the less-used catwalks. This was the place she went to brood, a habit that Lena had largely broken her of.

She would have a drink, except her system flushed out toxins as soon as they were detected. Widowmaker had never seduced anyone in her capacity as a Talon assassin, but the mod was there in case she ever had to fake getting drunk. All it meant now was that she got a pounding headache when she drank alcohol, but none of the intoxicating effects.

A shame. She really could have used the distraction.

It wasn’t until Lena’s absence that Widowmaker realized how tenuous her social connection to the world had become. She didn’t think of herself as the kind of person to get overly attached – not before, and certainly not after Talon – but somehow, it had happened. Without Lena, the number of true allies she had in Overwatch was frighteningly small.

Amélie paused a while on the balcony, looking out over the hangar. The decision facing her wasn’t particularly difficult, per se, but it also wasn’t something to do lightly.

The living quarters were at the far end of the complex, nearest the city of Gibraltar itself. Amélie had an apartment there, though she spent as little time in the spartan room as she could. When she wasn’t on a mission, she was usually at Lena’s. Being alone made Amélie uncomfortable. Moreso now that the condition was indefinite.

She passed by her own door and went up a floor to a different block of small, barracks-like apartments. The carpet here was worn thin with age; she could feel the concrete beneath the balls of her feet like she was wearing socks. The only thing that distinguished this place from low-rent housing in the city proper was the lack of graffiti.

She stopped in front of apartment 2M and knocked on the door, disturbing a few loose flakes of paint. A few moments later the door creaked open to reveal an impassive silver mask, glowing faintly green across where the eyes would be. “Widowmaker. What can I do for you?”

“I’m going to the practice range,” she said.

Genji looked over his shoulder into the dark apartment behind. His face was as unreadable as always, but his body language was unsure. “All right,” he said eventually. “I’ll meet you there.”

Widowmaker appreciated Genji’s efficiency with words. She was much less tolerant of chatter than the old Amélie had been, and Genji knew when terseness was appropriate.

She left him to finish up and grappled up to the roof of the apartment buildings. The easiest way to get across Gibraltar was by staying high, and she was going to have to ascend to a perch once she got there anyway. But once she rose above the concrete forest within sight of the horizon, she was hit by a sense of loss like a punch in the belly. 

These rooftops were thick with memories. Over there, Lena had completed her first _passe muraille_. Two buildings over, she’d had to rewind herself out of a fall after missing a _demi-tour_. These rooftops weren’t ideal for a beginning _traceuse_. They were unevenly spaced, and too high to allow mistakes. If Lena hadn’t been able to blink herself out of injury, Amélie wouldn’t have even tried to teach her here.

Talon hadn’t wanted its assassins getting emotional during missions – or at all – and Widowmaker had had to fight hard to rebuild her emotional core. The result of all her work was an empty ache that left her shaking as she made her way over the landscape towards the practice field. She kept her eyes firmly on the horizon as she went. The ocean didn’t remind her of Lena, so it was fine to look at. It reminded her a little of Château Guillard, which were not particularly happy memories, but at least those were blurred and dulled by Talon’s meddling.

She didn’t have a lot to thank the brainwashing fuckers for, but that one was appreciated.

Genji joined her on top of the sniping platform before long. “So,” he said wryly. “Should I queue up an actual simulation, or do you just want to shoot things?”

Amélie silently unslung Widow’s Kiss and loaded a clip of practice rounds into it.

“I suppose that is my answer.” He was silent for a moment, talking to the computers that coordinated the training bots. When he was done, they scattered, floating around randomly at top speed with no discernable coordination. Perfect.

Widowmaker systematically eliminated the bots one at a time. The practice rounds didn’t fire a projectile; they just made the bots emit a shower of sparks and fall down. When they were all down, they floated back to the middle and began again. She switched rooftops every couple of rounds, Genji following her quietly.

Finally, after the twelfth round, she set Widow’s Kiss down and it reconfigured into assault mode. Her voice was tight. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome,” he replied.

Genji didn’t push her to elaborate, but something about his quiet patience made her feel like she should. “It’s Morrison. He isn’t letting me go after Lena.”

“I hear Mexico’s support is a little unstable?”

“That’s the excuse, yes.”

Genji made a little noncommittal hum. “Jack isn’t the type to bury someone and move on. But he’s also not much of a shoulder to cry on.”

“I don’t need to cry,” Amélie said. “I need to get her back.”

“I know. I know what it’s like to have someone pull you back from the edge of self destruction, and bring you back into the sunlight. I know what it’s like to not know if that person is safe.”

There was an ironic note in his voice that took her a little while to decode. When she finally did, she felt a hot flush of shame. It was such an unfamiliar intrusion to the sparse landscape of her thoughts that it made her a little sick. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“I know you are,” he said, shrugging. “It’s all right. _He_ forgave you a long time ago. I…wasn’t as quick to let go. But Mondatta wasn’t _my_ brother, and you were not really to blame for his death.”

“Talon,” she growled.

“I feel I am supposed to counsel you to let go of your vengeance, but honestly, fuck Talon.” Genji stood from his resting lotus position in one fluid movement. “For what it’s worth, I agree with you. Lena is more important to the life of this new, fragile thing we are building than all the government support in the world.” He turned his head slightly, and Amélie got the impression that he was giving her a sidelong glance. “But you cannot help her from a jail cell. Tread carefully.”

Amélie sat on the roof for almost an hour after Genji said his goodbyes, staring out into the ocean, thinking. Eventually she pulled a pad from the carrying case she used for Widow’s Kiss. It wasn’t an official Overwatch pad – who knew who might be monitoring those? Instead, this was a cheap, nearly disposable burner that she kept for privacy and emergencies.

There were only two names in the contacts list. One of them was Lena’s; this was the same pad Amélie had first used when she defected. The other wasn’t a name at all, just two emoji symbols: a skull and a computer.

“ _Careful_ never got me very far,” Amélie muttered, and opened a new message.

\---

The vidphone rang, of course, when Emily was in the shower.

She had been telecommuting ever since Tracer had disappeared. She maintained just enough focus to do her work, so long as she didn’t have to get dressed and eat a proper breakfast and ride the Tube halfway across the city and interact with people face-to-face and sit in meetings where everyone could see she’d been crying. Emily could stand the empty apartment...as long as she didn’t leave it.

Her work schedule didn’t involve any phone meetings now, though, which meant this was a personal call. There was no way she could get to it in time, so she just focused on scrubbing the depression-funk off of herself and getting back out to the living room. 

She still took the time to shave, of course. Adding dysphoria to all her other problems was the last thing she needed.

After Emily made sure she was decent (well, close enough), she took the call. “Hi, Winston.”

“Hi, Emily.” Winston was in his lab; Emily could hear some kind of electric buzzing behind him. “Sorry it took so long to get back to you. Lots of red tape to get through. You’ve got some leeway in the system because you’re Lena’s partner, but…” he waved a hand noncommittally. “Well. You know. Bureaucracy.”

She leaned forward. “What can you tell me?”

“Is this a secure connection?” Winston asked.

“Winston, I write crypto software for a living. I know how this works.”

“Just gotta check. Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “So, uh. Lena was involved in an op in Dorado last week. Pretty routine.”

 _Dropping now. We’ll talk later._ Lena’s words had been haunting her since she went missing, and they hovered around the conversation again now. “Routine. Right.”

“We found something that was _not_ routine along the way. At first we thought it was a bomb. Turns out…it was something like a Slipstream engine. Tracer went in to defuse it – we have security camera footage of this – and both of them vanished in the middle of the street.”

Emily stared at the camera, her jaw dropping in shock. Lena had nightmares about her time in limbo at least three times a week. Emily had only gotten her to stop wearing her accelerator to bed after months of living together. And now? She’d just thought her girlfriend was _missing_ , not _actively in hell._ “But…her accelerator…?”

“We think,” Winston said slowly, “that the collateral damage would have been far worse if she hadn’t tried to stabilize the thing. At least, that’s what we think she was doing.”

“You _think_?”

Winston shifted. “Well, we haven’t exactly been able to get back out there to take samples. We got Lumérico to give us a few readings, but they don’t have the same equipment. All we have to go on is that, and the security footage.”

“Why haven’t you? It’s been a week!” Emily tugged at her fingers, trying to give herself something to do with her nervous energy. “If…if she was missing, you’d need to know the exact details of her displacement before you could find her again, right?”

“We can’t go into Mexico right now. It’s an ‘operational liability.’ ” Winston looked over his shoulder. “Between you and me, I think that’s nonsense.”

Emily tried not to think about what Lena must be going through. “So she’s just lost. And nobody’s going to look for her.”

“I’m doing what I can to prepare for a mission,” Winston said, “when we get authorization. I’m sorry, Emily. I wish I could have called you sooner.”

“Thank you.” She scrubbed at her eyes with one hand. Recent shower or not, she was sure she looked like hell. “Although now that I know, I’m not sure I’m better off knowing.”

“I’ll keep you posted as much as I can. Um...take care.” Winston reached for the camera and the picture cut to black.

Dazed, Emily finished her interrupted ablutions and opened the fridge to make a quick lunch. Lena’s leftovers were still there, takeout boxes and Tupperware that Emily had labeled and dated for her. It was stupid, but she couldn’t bear to throw them out.

_Welcome back, Lena. I kept your rotten food._

Nothing looked good, really, but she had to eat something. Emily grabbed some leftover takeout chicken and pitas and put together something approximating lunch. It disappeared without her really tasting it.

Emily sat a while, fidgeting with her empty plate. Eventually, she threw it away and stalked back to the terminal in the living room, keying in her manager’s vidphone number.

Sirene was an omnic, a London native like Lena. She lived somewhere a little nicer than King’s Row, though, thank God. Still, given the general English attitude towards omnics, they were relatively rare in fields like software engineering. Things were better in the Republic; Emily had had a lot more omnic coworkers when she had been working in her native Edinburgh.

“Emily. Need something?” Sirene’s eyelights flashed as the equivalent of a polite smile.

“I know I’ve been working from home a lot lately,” Emily said, “But I think that’s going to have to continue. I’m going abroad for a bit.”

“You’ll still be able to work on the STS intrusion tests?”

“If you can dial me into the meetings, sure.”

“Then there shouldn’t be a problem,” Sirene said. “May I ask where you’re going?”

“Mexico,” Emily said, glancing at the portrait of Lena on her desk. “I think I need a change in perspective.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't usually do the lyric fanfic thing, but this chapter was heavily influenced by my favorite Lights song, [Muscle Memory.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py-8NBJKiCk) Give it a listen if you're into electropop.


	7. Intersection pt. 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been forever since I've posted, and I'm sorry about that -- but this fic is not dead! Thank you all so much for your patience.

“Doctor Ziegler doesn’t know what is wrong with her,” Gerard said.

Amélie stood behind him in the kitchen of their apartment, rubbing the knots out of his shoulders. He sat slumped, head bowed and hair framing his neck. The streetlights outside their apartment painted dappled patterns on the kitchen table as rain sheeted down the window. 

“But she is Lena,” he continued. “She is obviously not fine, but she is putting a brave face on it. She wanted to run through some trainings at the base today.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Amélie asked.

“No,” He let out a long sigh, back muscles tightening under her hands. “I don’t know. Maybe. She didn’t deserve this. The girl has been through so much already, and now…”

When they had first met, Amélie had been struck by Lena’s quick smile, the way her hands never stood still. At first, she couldn’t reconcile the cheerful young woman with the stories she’d heard of the pilot stuck in temporal limbo. Lena had never held Amélie at arm’s length like some of the other members of Overwatch, never seemed intimidated by her family connections or her measure of ballet fame. In return, Amélie had taken to her just as much as Gerard had.

“Well,” Amélie said, “I have this stupid gallery opening this afternoon, but you should invite her over for dinner tonight.” Lately Lena had been a bit of a fixture in the Lacroix household when she was in town. At least, she had been before her abduction.

“I think she would like that.” He put his hand over hers. “Thank you. I’m not sure she has…much of a support network outside of Overwatch.”

“To be fair, neither do you.”

He winced. “Hey, that is not entirely true. I have you, do I not? If I didn’t, I...I don’t know what I would do. I am not sure how I would handle this.”

“You would be fine.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Without my Dulcinea, I would just be tilting at windmills all day.”

She rolled her eyes. “I think you were not paying attention to the plot of that ballet, my love.”

“Well, I was a _little_ distracted.”

She laughed and shoved him lightly. “Go. It is almost seven, traffic will be impossible.”

Ignoring her, Gerard stayed a little longer than he should have, puttering around the kitchen and cleaning things up while Amélie drank her coffee. He hid it under a the guise of being helpful, but she knew her husband. He was stalling, putting off his duties at the Watchpoint as long as he could.

\---

“Hello, _love_.”

Amélie bowed her head, feeling the heat shimmer against the back of her neck. “Bonjour.”

The fusion core was a Volskaya reactor, a miniature star of burning hydrogen in a gravitational bottle. There was no dramatic ball of plasma in a glass-walled room, no sparking Tesla coils in a cinematic array. Just a catwalk around a big metal cylinder, with lots of warning stickers and an ever-present, bone-rattling hum.

“Glad you showed up,” Pulsar said, a little further behind her. She wasn’t stupid enough to take an exposed back as a weak point. “It’s been so long since we’ve danced.”

Her words came out in a slur, like the spaces between them had been deleted. Amélie turned just in time to see Pulsar flicker out of view, leaving a few probability shadows behind to evanesce into smoke. “I cannot say I am as happy to see you.”

“Aren’t you wondering why I’m here?” Pulsar giggled from the other side of the catwalk, out of sight. 

“I am only here to stop you,” Amélie growled. “Whatever your goal, you will not be able to achieve it.”

“Aww. Grump.”

“Not in the mood for games.”

A red flash to Amélie’s right; she struck with a snap kick, but only hit a probability shadow. “I can force you to play,” Pulsar said. “Can’t force you to have fun, love.”

“Fine,” Amélie said, stalking carefully around the metal grating, past a WARNING: SPACETIME CURVATURE sign. “I will play. Why are you here?”

More laughter, a little closer this time. Another red flash; Amélie didn’t take the bait, and the flash dissolved in a black haze. “You’re no good at guessing if you’re giving up this early.”

“Maybe that is not the fun part.”

“Oooh, now you’re catching on.”

“Okay. You’re here to sow chaos in Numbani so Talon can steal something. That part’s obvious.”

“Is it?” A pulse of red light to Amélie’s left; she tackled to the right, just in time for her shoulder to collide with Pulsar’s midsection as she stepped out of a second, real rift. Pulsar skidded across the metal a few feet and landed in a crouch. She looked up and grinned. Amélie flinched – her gums had receded more since last time, and…was that a missing tooth?

“Why else would they be all over the streets, while you are here?”

Pulsar’s grin faltered, just for a moment. “Vague guesses won’t get you anywhere, love.”

Amélie struck out, hoping to grab part of Pulsar’s shirt before she could roll into another rift. Her hand swished through black smoke.

“If you wish to fight me,” Amélie said between her teeth, “you can simply say so. You do not have to do this.”

There was a metallic clanging from up above her. Pulsar appeared, sitting on the edge of the cylinder, legs dangling over the edge. She pulled a bottle of olive oil from somewhere and took a long pull, coughing slightly. “Isn’t that what I’m doing?”

“You do not have to hurt people.”

“Hah. You evacuated the train station, I know you did. You lot are predictable like that.”

“I mean the power station.” Amélie clenched her fists. “I mean _Fareeha_. She wasn’t even supposed to see combat and now she has a pipe through her midsection. She could _die_. And she was once your friend.”

Pulsar just stared at her for a moment.

“Do you not have anything to sa—”

Suddenly, Pulsar hurled the bottle at her. Amélie ducked, but Pulsar flashed behind her in a rush of wind and energy and cracked her in the back of the head with an elbow. Amélie had a brief view of Pulsar snatching the bottle out of the air and disappearing before her vision grayed out.

Pain exploded down Amélie’s back as she landed on her side. Her stomach recoiled at the blow and she nearly retched as she tried to stand up. She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to pull herself into her core. It wasn’t the first concussion she had suffered – nor the worst by far – and a distantly felt part of herself knew what to do in this situation. She trusted her training and reacted instinctively, waiting for the intense nausea to pass before she attempted to stand.

Someone was talking to her. Amélie made an effort to focus on the words.

“I’ve seen it,” Pulsar was saying, from the other side of the catwalk. “Flygirl is a fighter. She’ll be back in the skies in no time. It’s fine, it’s fine.”

“It’s…not…fine,” Amélie said, pulling herself up using the catwalk railing. Dizziness, acute nausea, but no confusion or loss of consciousness – she would be feeling this one for a few days, but she could still fight for now. “And I am done playing. You will not hurt anyone anymore.”

“Nice sentiment coming from you.” Pulsar giggled, a little more madly than before. “You and your bloody knife.”

Amélie steadied herself and quietly moved around the inside of the ring. It sounded like Pulsar was still in the same place, but a little distracted by something. “What knife?”

“They’re not going to be happy about all this,” Pulsar said, skipping conversational tracks again. “You and me, here, when we both have jobs we should be doing.”

“I am doing my job.”

“No, no, your job is…is…” Pulsar went quiet for a moment. “You should be with her. You can’t help me, you shouldn’t even try.”

Amélie was losing her. This happened a lot when they faced off – Pulsar would start clear headed, if a little prone to giggling fits, but would decay over the point of conversation to erratic mood swings and cryptic remarks. But Amélie had gotten intelligence off her this way, so it always paid to encourage it. “Who should I be with?”

“The new girl, the blue girl. The blue girl with the other blue girl.” She laughed again, rising and falling in pitch to some unseen conductor. “She fell sideways, the poor, poor lamb.”

Amélie stopped in her tracks, a quarter of the way around the circle from where she could hear Pulsar banging around in something metallic. “What did you just say?”

“Oops.”

“Who told you about her?”

“Someone’s not a very good spy-y,” Pulsar sang.

Amélie bolted into a run, hovering her hand by the rail in case the dizziness kicked up again. She rounded the curve to see Pulsar lying prone on the top of the cylinder, the top half of her body hanging down over the abyss. She had torn off an access panel and was digging around inside. A glowing blue light from within intersected with the crackling illumination from her accelerator to wash everything in unnatural magenta.

Amélie pulled Siegfried from its holster on her lower back and thumbed the ammo selector. Rather than the slower, more powerful slugs that the Gauss pistol usually threw, it would now shoot a cloud of less-damaging but faster and harder-to-dodge flechettes – perfect for a target who could move faster than bullets. She dropped into a stable stance and leveled her weapon at Pulsar. “Who. Told. You.”

“Touchy.” Pulsar glanced up, apparently unconcerned, and went right back to doing whatever she was doing. The light inside the cylinder rose and fell on a regular interval, like a slow heartbeat.

Siegfried shook, very slightly, in Amélie’s hands. “How much do you know?”

“I know everything, love. Shoulda figured that out by now. Spiders, swans – sounds like no matter where you are you’re too focused on the past.” She ripped something free of the inside of the reactor. Alarms began to blare up above the catwalk. “You know, you look good in blue. That other me has good taste. Shame about what I’m going to have to do to her.”

As though watching herself from the outside, Amélie fired three shots at Pulsar’s center of mass.

\---

It was hours later, when she had just gotten to the gallery opening, that Amélie received the call.

The gallery was owned by a friend of her uncle Rémy. Rémy was a portly man with plenty of red in his complexion and plenty of black in his ledgers, one of the Guillard scions who had taken his share of the family’s ancient wealth and shaped it into the modern aristocracy of business. He was also well-connected in the French government, and one of the reasons there was a watchpoint in Paris despite it being fairly close to the headquarters in Zurich.

She owed Rémy some family favors, and the gallery owner was a fan of ballet. This was how things got done in the social stratosphere -- when millions ceased to be real currency, facetime became the most precious commodity. Like Gerrard, she fought for the cause; she just wore different armor.

The guests were milling around in the way that rich people did when they were pretending they weren’t still damp from the rain. Rémy had introduced her to the gallery owner, a slim woman with a nervous, birdlike energy. “I know it’s clichéd, but…your turn as Odette in Swan Lake was a _vision_.”

She smiled and nodded. The compliment was so trite that pointing it out as a clichéd was itself a cliché. Who even said things like that anymore? “It is the most popular ballet of all time for a reason.”

“Have you ever thought of going back to the stage?”

No. No, she wouldn’t. “Perhaps.”

The gallery owner tittered. “That would be lovely.”

Despite the bland first impression, Amélie settled into the conversation with Ms. Dubois without too much pain. She didn’t leave people starstruck very often -- ballet certainly wasn’t the most widespread of pop culture -- but she recognized the signs. The woman’s twitchiness faded into a more purposeful excitement as the conversation turned from Amélie to the gallery itself.

Amélie’s phone chirruped about half an hour into the conversation. She smiled politely and excused herself, stepping over to an empty corner of the gallery to take the call. It was not very private, but she didn’t feel like stepping out into the rain, and the alcove with a few impressionist landscapes and a gaudy abstract sculpture was relatively deserted. 

She frowned at the phone when she took it out of her purse. Why was Ana Amari calling her?

“Hello?”

“Amélie,” Ana said in barely accented French, “this is Ana. You need to come to the Watchpoint as soon as possible. There’s been an accident.”

Her soul froze. “Gerard?”

“Just get here as soon as you can.”

Amélie walked out the door and summoned a car without another word.

\---

Pulsar was faster than the flechettes, but only barely, and she was distracted. She flashed away in a flare of red light, but Amélie heard a cry of pain from the other side of the catwalk as she landed heavily. The pistol in her hands felt like a millstone, a thousand kilos of crushing weight. Amélie’s heavy footsteps echoed erratically off the high ceiling as she rounded the catwalk.

Pulsar knelt on the steel mesh floor, one palm against the ground, the other clutching her hip. A dark stain was spreading in the thin fabric of her leggings – blood, drained of color by the flashing red alarm lights. She was motionless, but the probability shadows around her thrashed and flailed. Many of them reached for Amélie with their desperate, ephemeral forms before dissolving.

Other than that, there was no reaction as Amélie approached and crouched next to her, Siegfried still drawn. “I am sorry, Lena.”

Pulsar laughed, very slightly, just a hitch in her ragged breathing and a slight movement of the lank hair obscuring her face. “Why would you call me that? Don’t you already have one of those?”

“We used to.” Amélie unclipped the temporal inhibitor from her belt and snapped it around Pulsar’s wrist.

Pulsar drew in a shuddering breath and convulsed, back arching, throwing off her balance and landing sideways on the floor. One eye was still covered by her hair, but the other was shocked open, pupil contracted to a dark pinprick, bloodshot and rimmed with black. The probability shadows snapped out of existence like someone flipped a light switch. “No. No! NO! What are you doing?”

“I am taking you home.”

“No. You can’t keep me here. I have to get out, you can’t keep me here, I have to-- you can’t--”

Amélie recoiled. She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t this.

The temporal inhibitor flared blue as Pulsar’s accelerator sputtered. Pulsar started shaking and screaming, a hoarse, pained sound halfway between a wail and a groan.

“This is Odette,” Amélie said, backing off. “Target is down, I need medical assistance immediately. Reactor core, third level catwalk.”

Static crackled in her earpiece, in a cadence that might have been Jack’s voice. “Jack? Anyone? Do you read?” More static, indistinct against the rising sound of Pulsar’s pained screams.

Pulsar’s flailing hand found something on the catwalk that Amélie hadn’t noticed – a small metal piece with what looked like blue glass inside, with wires hanging off of it that had clearly just been torn out. Before Amélie could respond, Pulsar desperately clutched it to her temporal accelerator.

“See…you…next time,” she gasped. The room flared red as the accelerator burned back to life, electric arcs linking it to the object. Pulsar’s temporal shadows returned, blooming like a night lotus, sprinting away from her towards the walls in every direction. A rhythm of metallic bangs began to shake them as the catwalk flexed in and out, the central cylinder beginning to shake side to side in some kind of resonant cascade.

Amélie ducked forwards, clutching through the blinding mists. She felt for any sign of Pulsar, feeling only the metal grating underneath her hands as cyclonic winds appeared, forming an apocalyptic counterpoint to the hellish red light. The bucking of the catwalk almost threw her off her balance.

She found skin, a hand, all sharp angles and lines. She clutched Pulsar’s hand as she tried to pull away. Something white-hot burned her skin as she grasped her way up to Pulsar’s shoulder.

Pulsar tried to pull away, but Amélie held firm. There was just one question running through her mind.

“Why?”

The shadows parted, just for a moment, just long enough to show Pulsar’s face. Her eyes were red and shiny with tears, avoiding Amélie’s gaze. Her mouth moved. The words were sucked away by the wind, but her lips were clear.

“Sorry, love.”

Pulsar vanished, and Amélie’s hand closed on nothing.

\---

They hadn’t really needed Amélie to identify Gerard’s body, not in the era of instantaneous genetic testing. He was unrecognizable anyway. Jack had finally told her they never even found his head.

But even then, a myriad of small things kept her at the Overwatch base until early the next morning. Emergency debriefs, insurance, the myriad of tiny chores that surrounded the death of a spouse, like flies around a corpse. She completed each one diligently, burying the shock and the horror. If she was just doing paperwork, she could pretend he was on assignment, that he would be coming back.

But the paperwork ran out, and the sympathy became an incoherent background drone. Everyone was in shock and grieving, but they walked on eggshells around Amélie. She couldn’t take it anymore, so she denied Angela’s offer of a cot in the infirmary and caught a car home.

As she stepped through the threshold into her darkened apartment, her phone spoke.

_Voice Reminder: “When I get home, preheat the oven for dinner with Lena.”_

Amélie froze at the sound of her own voice, a voice coming from what felt like a million years ago. An Amélie who wasn’t a widow, who hadn’t been shattered.

She barely managed to close the door behind her before she crumpled to the ground, sobbing in her empty apartment.

***

Amélie knew Ana’s age, but only as a sort of abstract statistic. The admiral usually felt ageless, a commanding presence who was wiser than anyone else in the room, but could also take anyone else in a fight.

The figure bent over in the hospital chair seemed like a completely different woman.

“Sit,” she said, without raising her head. It was so quiet Amélie almost mistook it for the rhythmic hissing of the ventilator.

Ana sat down next to Ana, carefully. There was a subdued bustle outside the sliding glass door of the private room, but in that moment there were only three people in the entire world.

“I’m sorry,” Amélie said.

“It’s not your fault.” Ana sighed. “It’s mine.”

“It’s not your fault any more than any of this was. You can’t keep her in an egg carton forever.”

Ana’s shoulders shook slightly, but it might have been a trick of the dim light. “Did our…guest...tell you about what happened to me on her side of the fence?” She looked up. “I guess not. You’ve been avoiding her.”

Amélie studied her hands. “I have my reasons.”

“Regardless. Her Amélie, or what was left of her, became a Talon sniper. She blinded my alternate with a trick scope shot. And their Ana disappeared, for years. Faked her own death, went off to become a vigilante. Her Fareeha went into the military, then followed my-- _her_ mother’s footsteps into Overwatch. She risks her life every day on the front lines.”

“Do you have any idea why the other Ana would abandon her child like that?”

“I do. That’s the part that terrifies me. Not that some abstract other me made that choice, but… I was never a natural mother. To say I had second thoughts would be an understatement.”

Amélie glanced at her, but the older woman’s face betrayed no emotion. Her eyes were closed, apparently serene. “I cannot imagine turning on you like that.”

“That’s why it’s called brainwashing, Amélie.”

“Speaking of,” Amélie said. “I need to talk to you. Is this room monitored?”

“Of course it’s monitored. It’s a hospital room. But if you’re asking if it’s bugged? No. Why?”

“Talon has a very highly-placed mole.”

Ana’s head snapped up. “Explain.”

“She knew things. Things about Le-- about the visitor. About her home. And more than just the general rumors that are going around; these are things I think she only told Jesse and Fareeha and a few other people.” Amélie glanced at the figure in the bed. “Maybe the _Ziegler_ is bugged, or maybe there is a mole among the staff. She seemed to know about Fareeha’s duplicate, too, I am not sure.”

Ana swore softly. “I knew it was only a matter of time until this happened. Talon has gotten bolder and bolder, and sometimes it feels like we’re the only ones standing in their way. Especially since anti-Talon contracts have been drying up.”

“Hm.”

“So,” Ana said. “You still need to debrief.”

“Are you sure now is a good time?”

“It’s never a good time. But now more than ever I need to know what’s going on. So that _this_ doesn’t happen.” Her voice got a touch rougher for a moment. “It helps to keep…a measure of control over the situation.”

“She used some kind of power drain on the train station to fool the monitoring systems at the plant, causing an overload and getting herself access to the Volskaya reactor core. I engaged her there, wounding her and…” The words slipped out of her throat for a moment. “And attaching the inhibitor. It did not work.”

She extracted a fused, melted lump of metal from her pocket and handed it to Ana, exposing the bright angry burn scar on her left forearm right underneath the feather pattern tattoo. “Or rather, it did work, but Pulsar was able to overload it somehow. Possibly with the piece she extracted from the reactor.”

“About that,” Ana said, taking the ruined inhibitor and turning it over in her hands. “Pulsar managed to get away with the most irreplaceable piece in the entire assembly.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s a temporal isolator. Based on Winston’s work for Lena’s initial stabilizer… the same one that our neighborly visitor was wearing when she arrived. It keeps errant gravity waves from disturbing the graviton surge that holds the fusing plasma in place.”

Amélie closed her eyes, saw all over again the explosion of temporal shadows when Pulsar attached the device to her corrupted stabilizer. “What does Talon want with that? Are they trying to…upgrade her?”

“What they’re doing with it isn’t as important as what we’re doing without it,” Ana said. “This is a city of one point four million omnic citizens, who have just lost one third of their electricity supply. The isolator isn’t irreplaceable, but Volskaya Industries has to build another one to fit from scratch. Not to mention repair the damage to the reactor. There’s a backup on the other side of town, and about the same capacity in solar panels… but those combined are barely enough to keep the population going, and that’s with immediate rationing.”

“Famine,” Amélie said quietly.

“Something like that. I remember the food riots in Cairo when I was in my twenties. If something like that happened here…” Ana shook her head. “We’re going to need to pull in everyone to keep this city running. And we’re going to have to do it on spec, because Numbani can’t spare the credits right now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That means no chasing Pulsar.”

Amélie straightened. “Admiral—”

“You can keep up your monitoring,” Ana interrupted. “But no field trips. We can’t spare the expense and we can’t spare you. The population is already on a knife’s edge from the Talon incursion in other parts of the city, and the rationing is going to make things worse.”

“With all due respect, I think you are making a grave mistake in not going after Pulsar now.”

“I know you think that, but it’s my job to make these decisions. And I understand you. Really, I do.” At that, Ana went silent, letting the beeping heart monitor make her point for her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Emma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emmalyn/pseuds/Emmalyn) for editing!


End file.
